Be
Meant to post this ages ago, but I’m fairly rubbish, so I didn’t. I decided against going with UKFSN in the end.
I thought I’d give Be a go seeing as my exchange is enabled. I was well aware I’d never get 24meg as UKFSN indicated I could only get 0.5meg and I was on <1meg with Eclipse.
I should point out my reasons for leaving Eclipse. They used to be very, very good. They offered me rADSL when all the other ISPs refused. Sadly this is no longer the case, almost everyone I know who used them has now switched ISP. My connection started to die every evening. Especially when it wasn’t being used. Of course because I run Azureus that always gets the blame. Doesn’t seem to matter if it still died when all the PCs were switched off… Then things got worse and it would die briefly every night for about 3 nights, then I’d have a week of no ADSL at all. None of my routers (I have a little family of the things now) would sync at all. This is the type of thing that scares me. Lots. Their CS department were, for want of a better word, shite. They closed the calls suggesting my password was wrong on the router! It took about 4 attempts of re-opening calls, raising new ones and putting massive rants in about MACs before they finally said “oh your profile was messed up on the exchange, it’s fine now”. Grrrrrrr. Oh also, around this time my Dad had a spazz at me for not being able to fix it myself and accused me of knowing nothing about PCs :/ This whole scenario happened a few more times before I gave up, requested the MAC and applied for a connection with Be.
The switchover from Eclipse was nice and painless. There were a few teething issues though:
As mentioned before I have lots of modem/routers, this has led me to have a slightly complicated hardware set-up as there are no modem/routers/APs around that do everything perfectly. They always have at least one flaw. With Eclipse I had a Belkin N1 as the modem/router hooked up to a Linksys WRT300N as the AP. The N1 gave me better download speeds and really good QoS, but the WiFi range was appalling. Much worse than my Pre-N AP. The WRT300N, on the other hand, was awful at QoS, gave me rubbish speeds but had excellent WiFi coverage. So rather than leave one to get dusty in a box, I used them both. It was the perfect solution…
Until I switched. Be used to work with any old ADSL2+ router apparently, that is until they “changed something”. No-one has said what, but to be honest I probably wouldn’t understand, networking isn’t my thing. Now only specific chipsets seem to work well. The N1 is rumoured to work, but only with some hacked firmware which is about as easy to obtain as rocking horse poo. It’s mentioned countless times, but no-one states where to get it from. I think you have to know the funny handshake.
So anyway, I used the Be Box (not a really old box, this is the name of the Be Modem, a re-badged SpeedTouch). It connected fine, I set up all the port-forwarding, all seemed to work. No saveall button on the webgui though. Never mind. Then it rebooted. Then it did it again… and again. It seems they overheat at the drop of a hat. So I propped it up on 2 books so that it had airflow underneath and all was well. Then I went out with my laptop and decided to remote on to home. No joy. Weird as I’d set up all the ports. Got home, lights were on and flashing but I couldn’t get into the webgui at all and had no internet connection. Did what any self-respecting former IT-Support geek would do and turned it off and on. All OK.It did this a few more times, lights on but no-one home. Then I realised it had wiped all my settings. Including my new admin username & password which was a bit worrying. Anyway, I found some useful CLI commands and set about changing some more advance features (by Christ SpeedTouches are not for geeks, they are SOOOO locked down!) and finally a saveall command! Since I did that it hasn’t randomly rebooted, hasn’t frozen and has let me remote on from the outside world. Touch wood… (I’ve recently discovered on-line that it’s the WiFi part that causes the overheating, which may explain why that no longer happens to me since I sorted the saveall issue and I’m using the WRT300N as the AP).
Oh yeah, the best bit? I’m not on 0.5meg, or even <1meg… I’m on 3.5meg!
OK, so it’s nowhere near 24meg, but on the 5.50km line length and appalling quality line I’m on. It’s awesome AND I’m paying less per month for this service than I was before!
Originally published at Chaos-23. You can comment here or there.