ISP Be offers one of the fastest residential broadband services in the UK, with a theoretical maximum of 24Mbit/s. By comparison BT’s fastest residential service is 8Mbit/s. However, the Be service is not available in all parts of the UK.

Be is one of the more recent ISP startups, set up in October 2004 by Boris Ivanovic and Dana Pressman. In June this year, mobile operator O2 acquired Be for £50m.

Currently Be offers three broadband services. The two residential variants are Be Unlimited and Be Lite. Be Unlimited costs £24 per month with unlimited downloads, and a maximum download speed of 24Mbit/s. Be Lite offers the same download speed but costs £14 per month with usage capped at 1GB. However, an extra 5GB can be purchased for an additional £5. Be also offers a small-business option called Be Office, which includes eight static IP addresses, for £75 + VAT.

To switch from one broadband provider to another, customers need to obtain a Migration Access Code (MAC) from their current supplier. In the past, telecoms providers have often been slow to provide the MAC, but following pressure from regulator Ofcom the process now seems much faster. We asked our original ISP Wanadoo for our MAC and were sent it by email in under a week. We then ordered Be Unlimited online, keying in the MAC code and our financial details.

We moved from a 512kbit/s service to Be Unlimited’s 24Mbit/s in well under a month with no problems. The downtime between services was a few days. Online, we could track the shipment of the required Thomson SpeedTouch 716g wireless router (pictured), known as the Be Box. The installation of the router was a matter of plugging in a power supply – a LAN cable – to the PC NIC, and a modem connection to the telephone socket. No other configuration was necessary. The 716g has four 10/100Mbit/s LAN ports and two “voice over IP (VoIP)” ports, which Be intends to use for a further service launch, yet to be announced. The 716g also has a firewall and intrusion-detection functions.

We checked download data rates using Paessler’s PRTG Traffic Grapher bandwidth monitoring and management software. Immediately after the Thomson wireless router was installed we saw a peak download rate of 7.9Mbit/s when downloading Windows XP Service Pack 2 from Microsoft. We also checked the rate using online tools available at the ADSLGuide.org.uk web site. This showed downloads within five percent of our earlier figure and rated the uploads at 1.2Mbit/s.

We then contacted Be, which carried out some remote administration to the onboard “profile” of the router, which subsequently gave download rates nearer to 14Mbit/s using the same test file.

As the crow flies, the distance of our test site from the nearest exchange is 0.8km. Apart from the distance from the exchange, another big influence on download speeds is the condition of wiring on premises. The distances from premises to the nearest broadband exchanges can be checked via tools at the SamKnows web site.