upgrading broadband

neil · **Joined:** Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:50 pm **Posts:** 944

I can't find the thread, but I think someone recently mentioned upgrading the broadband to get more bandwidth. I don't know where we are contractually with BT, but maybe it's worth switching to another provider such as Be, who are apparently very cheap, fast and reliable.

This is the Be Pro package:
https://www.bethere.co.uk/broadbandoffice.do

I rang them and the guy I spoke to said forest would be able to get this on the BT business line and could expect download speeds of 14Mbps. Uploads would be 1.5Mbps. He confirmed the cost would be £21.50 a month in total, with a £24 connection fee. (Last time I checked we pay about £35 a month to BT for broadband)

The only possible complication is that the direct debit may need to be set up via an individual's account rather than the business account, though possibly not.

He said the service is compatible with Linux, though of course they only support Windoze & Mac.

ChaoticReality · **Posted:** Tue Jan 27, 2009 2:53 pm

Looks good.

Be are highly recommended by all my techie friends and I have personal reasons for disliking BT; Have you heard of Phorm? It's a tracking service that watches every webpage you visit so you can get more targeted adverts and *cough*spam*cough* emails from your service provider. It's a massive privacy invasion and there's nothing you can do about it, since it's all done at BT's end of the connection. They ran this in secret without informing anybody and passed all of the customer's data to this third party. More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webwise and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/29/phorm_roundup/ and http://badphorm.co.uk/

More speed would be good, we do get a bit laggy at times.

martinmckenna · **Posted:** Tue Jan 27, 2009 3:14 pm

its looks great ,

martin

neil · **Joined:** Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:50 pm **Posts:** 944

I just checked with BT. We are paying 29.99 + VAT per month. Apparently we max out at 8Mbps, though of course we probably only get about 4 or 5.

One month's notice is required to quit.

ChaoticReality · **Posted:** Tue Jan 27, 2009 3:24 pm

There is no way we get 4/5 Mbps, let alone 8.

I will check when I get into the Forest today but I think we are only getting 2Mbps tops.

Let's give in the notice.

Duncan · **Joined:** Sun Apr 10, 2005 7:22 pm **Posts:** 405

It might be worth checking out Virgin. I did make a thorough attempt to get cable many moons ago but they (Telewest in those days) refused to accept that we could be connected, despite the existing sockets of theirs. But that was ages ago and may worth another go.

neil · **Joined:** Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:50 pm **Posts:** 944

ChaoticReality wrote:

Let's give in the notice.

Need to get a MAC code from BT. I can do this if it is what the people want.

I checked Virgin. As far as I could tell, they are more expensive and they like to limit your gigabytage. Be is unlimited subject to fair usage policy. Anyone know how much gigabytage we use per month, overall?

Duncan · **Joined:** Sun Apr 10, 2005 7:22 pm **Posts:** 405

Would cost £46 (including vat) a month for Virgin business 10meg.

I don't know, but I reckon their throttling will be less or non-existant for business connections.

I'd be happy to get in touch with them and at least find out if it's a possibility.
Installation would cost, no idea how much.

Gandhi · **Posted:** Wed Jan 28, 2009 8:03 am

not heard great things about Virgin at all.
Heard very good things about O2 though

Duncan · **Joined:** Sun Apr 10, 2005 7:22 pm **Posts:** 405

Well, I've been a Telewest/Virgin customer since the early days of cable and they've been very good. There is some throttling on residential connections at certain times of day after you pass a certain quota (a lot of video downloads) but mostly get full 10 meg, much better than any ADSL I've experienced.

Had a good experience with their support as well.

We had their business cable in Westport and that worked out well.

Gandhi · **Posted:** Wed Jan 28, 2009 2:02 pm

Duncan works for Virgin.

ChaoticReality · **Posted:** Wed May 12, 2010 6:15 am

*bump*

Our broadband is still slow and clunky. Can we do something about it?

neil · **Joined:** Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:50 pm **Posts:** 944

I'd still like to know how many gigabytes we download per month, to be sure we won't fall afoul of any fair usage policies. Can anyone measure this and give me a rough figure?

Also, can anyone confirm that the slow speeds are due to lack of bandwidth and not the limitations of some ancient piece of hardware we have in our setup?

Thanks.

milk · **Posted:** Wed May 12, 2010 12:20 pm

i'm sure i've phoned BT about something a couple of years ago and they said that our connection always gets capped due to high usage after about a day into the month.

the best way we can combat this is by using the QoS settings on the WRT router. we have things setup which we think are working, but the firmware is ooold and doesn't have nifty features such as graphs for QoS differentiation and logs of individual machines throughput.

mike - could i ask that you have a look at upgrading the firmware? while i know there are various distros based on the OpenWRT (Gargoyle seems a together project) or DD-WRT which do nifty things, i'm afraid i don't have the lunix-fu to go about it. something that allows us to drill down to what traffic is going where and refine our QoS would be awesome if possible.

milk · **Posted:** Wed May 12, 2010 12:24 pm

or maybe we could hack up an aerial or two to stick on the roof so we could start a Freifunk style community network...

(and *cough*darknet*cough*)

or maybe not....

dan · **Joined:** Wed Apr 13, 2005 12:04 pm **Posts:** 1410

i (heart) the darknet

neil · **Joined:** Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:50 pm **Posts:** 944

neil wrote:

I'd still like to know how many gigabytes we download per month, to be sure we won't fall afoul of any fair usage policies. Can anyone measure this and give me a rough figure?

Also, can anyone confirm that the slow speeds are due to lack of bandwidth and not the limitations of some ancient piece of hardware we have in our setup?

Thanks.

Bumpity-bumpity-bumpity-bump

Mike, you've been looking at this recently? Can we get some expert advice?

ChaoticReality · **Posted:** Fri Jun 18, 2010 1:35 am

I haven't had chance to check this out properly. I'll get some monitoring software running and see what data I can gather.

neil · **Joined:** Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:50 pm **Posts:** 944

Thanks.

ChaoticReality · **Posted:** Fri Jun 18, 2010 3:27 pm

Our new router is running dd-wrt so I should be able to get some pretty decent figures soon.

neil · **Joined:** Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:50 pm **Posts:** 944

I just called Be again. They're offering genuinely no limits (they say), up to 20meg broadband for £17.88 per month. I'm thinking we should just go for this. Be have a good reputation and it sounds like BT have been pretty shit lately? And Be is cheaper.

They will also give us a free router, which might be handy.

neil · **Joined:** Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:50 pm **Posts:** 944

Quote:

Our new router is running dd-wrt so I should be able to get some pretty decent figures soon

New router?

neil · **Joined:** Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:50 pm **Posts:** 944

For £21.97 per month (extra £4) we can get a faster upload speed (2.5 instead of 1.3 meg) and one static IP address. Anyone think this would be worthwhile?

ChaoticReality · **Posted:** Fri Jun 18, 2010 4:10 pm

The old router went boom yesterday morning. We now have a dlink dir-615d, donated by Huw, running in its place.

ChaoticReality · **Posted:** Fri Jun 18, 2010 4:11 pm

Also, I support moving to Be and getting more upload speed (because we'll be doing some off-site backups with dropbox) and a static IP.

Shannon · **Posted:** Mon Jun 21, 2010 9:25 am

nix · **Joined:** Sat Dec 16, 2006 4:49 am **Posts:** 1231

do it!

ChaoticReality · **Posted:** Mon Jun 21, 2010 4:03 pm

We're averaging about 7 gigabytes of traffic a day at present.

milk · **Posted:** Thu Jun 24, 2010 3:09 pm

yay, great work getting the the new router up and running mike

neil · **Joined:** Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:50 pm **Posts:** 944

Thanks Mike.

I just found out BT have us signed up to a 2 year contract for broadband since February! This was done without authorization so I'm making a complaint in an attempt to extricate us.

ChaoticReality · **Posted:** Fri Jun 25, 2010 9:10 am

Hmm, that's a bit dodgy.

Well, when you get Be sorted, chuck me the username and password for the PPoE and I'll get the router reconfigured.

neil · **Joined:** Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:50 pm **Posts:** 944

Just got off the phone with highly annoying BT legalspeak person. They flatly refuse to give any ground on the contract. They are sending me an official statement of their legal position and telling me I should take it up with the telecoms regulator. So that, I suppose, is what I will do.

milk · **Posted:** Sat Aug 07, 2010 4:13 pm

is this someone from the complaints dept? only they can change or cancel contracts just like that, iirc.

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upgrading broadband

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