I pre-registered with Be Unlimited a few months ago, and then completely forgot about it. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from their MD, Dana Pressman. Dana and I worked on a little startup way way back ago when I was at Virgin and she was at Sapient, (before the boom, before the bust), and I haven't seen her since.
I volunteered to be one of the first guinea pigs for the new service.
It turns out I was not only one of the first, but the actual FIRST. Their very first punter. I think this may make me the first person in the entire country with such a fat pipe, since to the best of my knowledge, the other providers have announced, but not launched, such a service.
Switching providers didn't exactly go smoothly ( the fault of my existing provider shutting off connectivity too soon), but I've heard of people with far worse experiences with established players like Bulldog and BT, and you get a special kind of service when you enter at this stage (Faulty modem? one of our techies will come round later with a new one (and please can we take some pictures?)), but at about 6.30pm last night, I was up and running.
## What's it like?
Downstream: 18.6 Mbits/second
Upstream: 1.236 Mbits/second
I didn't think it would make that much difference. But it's actually really bloody excellent. After 20 minutes, I was utterly sold. Especially having decent upstream:
I've been saying for a while now that the providers' models are all wrong. Most businesses (outside of certain media niches) don't need SDSL (any large scale websites are hosted in a datacenter, and not on the office connectivity), but consumers are into P2P in a big way, are uploading massive files to flickr.com and everywhere else. As time goes on, the idea that most consumers are passive media sponges rather than distributors gets more and more broken, by the evidence. Let business have adsl, and give me as much upstream as you can.
We need decent upstream. I hope that Be shake up the market in a big way.
I have a question though: What should I be using it for (apart from the obvious)? What applications should I be trying? What should I be playing with? Suggestions most welcome.
(I might start with moving whitelabel.org, since I have more domestic bandwidth that its current hosting.)