BE Broadband

Be offer a free router with their packages but in the small print it tells you that they will demand either the router back (at your own postage expense) or a fee of £35 if you cancel (at any time). This information isn't immediately upfront when signing up and you have to look really closely to see it.

I wouldn't rate them as any better than BT. Their information is misleading (DHCP is effectively static, hidden charge of £35 or return of router if you ever cancel, gaming broadband packages not actually offering any real world advantages over value package, etc). Their website is terrible (about as basic and clumsy as you can imagine) and their speeds at best are average and often slow. And it costs a bit more than many other ISPs for the privelage of being with them.

Not recommended.

Where does one start?
1,Frequent issues with core network-peering-routing
2,frequent disconnects, unable to access sites that others with different isp's can from time to time
3 the lack of urgency to rectify things can &does sometimes take them months to fix ,

If they had SLA's then I'm sure it would be a lot different
My opinion of BE,is it's not the great ISP that some hype it up to be, but you could be one of the lucky people who either don't have issues or are just blissfully unaware that they exist ,

update on the peering issues be announced that this problem had been fixed on the 19th august it was not fixed and is still causing issues to some customers who are unfortunately routed a certain way,Lack of peering capacity @(Linx)
Their support needs improvement too,

BE has gone down the potter, I signed up last July (2011) and had months of good service, despite the initial set up problems and delays, Everything went good with only 1day problems every now and then. Which is totally fine and I never raised tickets about it.

Since November 2011 I've been having intermittent issues (along with many other users) with streaming services such as youtube and bbc iplayer. This issue is still ongoing as of March 2012.

The major issues started in February 2012 when we spent 2weeks with intermittent packet loss and then a week with over 90% packet loss and unusable internet, during this time customer support was terrible, they claimed the problem was fixed over 3 times. It took them over 5 days to even realise it was their fault. Updates and any knowledge on the problem were non existent and just a general bad experience.

After the ordeal was over, after spending days on the support system the staff finally let up and gave me 1month of broadband service for free. So I let it go; my gripe wasn't the fact of the service issues, it was how the CS dealt with it and in general the support just not being there.

Keep in mind the streaming problems continue to occur during all of this time.

Start of March 2012 we have DNS problems for a few days, more problems but nothing switching to Google DNS didn't solve. However just after the DNS was fixed, packet loss issues again, lag spikes in games and sites unresponsive. Every site I used pingplotter on had packet loss, the lowest being bbc.co.uk at 2% and google at 7%. Things like riftgame.com, hp.co.uk all above 90% packet loss along with the majority of other sites.

This problem is still ongoing and again support staff unable to deal with it with no updates yet again, BE fail to learn their lesson and have the same problems a mere 2-3weeks from the massive Feb 2012 issues they had.

Terrible customer service all around who don't honestly care. So I decided to get a free cancellation and move my ISP provider. I won't return to BE purely based on customer service experience.

I live about 600metres away from the exchange according to samknows and had been using this service for 2 years (September 2009 to September 2011) and I can say it's a great service. During those two years of service, I never once had any disconnection or packet loss issue.

I'm a gamer myself and my ping is constantly below 50ms ping (below 10ms for UK servers) unless connecting to a east coast American server where it ranges between 90ms to 140ms ping. Speed wise, I get about 17Mbps to 20Mbps depending on the day, I have no fuzz about not getting the speed I am paying for, it's understandable that line distance is a major contributor to lost of speed. Streaming 720p and 1080p is great too! No wait time!

Sadly, I had to move to an area where there are no spare capacities in the exchange. Otherwise, I would have continued with this service.

It maybe worth getting your own router though, I would not use the Thompson router that BE provides.

Services - Website and forum are decent enough

would like some better themes.

Also the BE usergroup IRC channel is pretty helpful.

Support - I've had a few problems with dial tone loss which has been fixed swiftly

i had another fault where i had complete lose of sync BE had gotten a OR engineer round with in 2 hours and fixed the problem by replacing the master socket.

Speed - Speed is good (15Mbps) no major slow downs great ping a part from the LINX problems a few weeks back which are now pretty much solved for me anyways though i know some customers are still suffering.

Value - Well there not cheap but if you want unlimited and unthrottled broadband i'd say its a fair price to pay.

EDIT: Well thats it i've had enough of the BE billed me wrongly nothing but lag in games no bbc access a complete mess

STAY AWAY FROM THIS ISP