Broadband

Be, the O2-owned ISP, has begun allowing its users to customised their broadband connections to prioritise the line towards their favoured activities.

There are four settings on offer. Standard, for everyday broadband use; speed, for watching videos and iPlayer; reliability, recommended for surfing the web for information and VoIP and gaming, which ensures the quickest possible response times from servers. In the background the settings are altering the SNR at the DSLAM and enabling/disabling FastPath.

Be users can select their favoured setting by logging on to the ISP’s member centre and choosing from the four options. The mode selected can be changed at any time.

Felix Geyr, Managing Director of Be Broadband, summed up the reasons behind the move as the company realising the web is not only used for email and web browsing so connections have to be adaptable to suit individuals’ needs.
“As consumers become increasingly sophisticated in their internet needs, the one size fits all approach will no longer suffice,” he said. “Be’s customised approach is like tuning the engine of a car to get the best performance. While the speed of your internet is still dependent upon your individual broadband connection, this new service will allow Be members to get the most out of their broadband.”
Be is not the first ISP to offer customisable settings. Eclipse started a similar service this Spring and claims that it has been popular with users. There is a wide choice of traffic types on offer, from VPN to FTP and P2P to email so users can prioritise which type of traffic they want to run fastest on their connection. Somebody working from home will typically prioritise VPN whilst a gamer might well prioritise the gaming mode.

Feedback so far from Eclipse has been that it has gone down well and that, following comments from users, the ISP is looking to add more categories to give a wider choice of which type of traffic users want to prioritise.

Update: Headline adjusted to reflect the fact that this is not traffic shaping. Instead it uses tweaks at the DSLAM level to offer customisable line profiles.

Tags: Be, Eclipse