 | |
| Company type | ISP |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet &Communications |
| Founded | 2005 |
| Defunct | 2013 (rebrand to Sky Home Communications Limited) |
| Fate | Bought byBSkyB with all customers transferred toSky Broadband |
| Headquarters | London,United Kingdom |
Key people | Carolyn Hewitt, Daniel Cunliffe, Louise Kirlew[1] |
| Products | Broadband |
| Owner | British Sky Broadcasting |
| Website | (ViaWayback Machine)http://www.bethere.co.uk |
Be Unlimited (also traded asBe There or simplyBE and latterly known legally asSky Home Communications Limited) was anInternet service provider in theUnited Kingdom between 2004 and 2014. Initially founded as an independent company by Boris Ivanovic and Dana Tobak in 2005,[2] it was bought by Spanish groupTelefónica Europe in 2006 before being sold on toBSkyB in March 2013 in an agreement which saw BSkyB buy the fixed telephone line and broadband business of Telefónica Europe which at the time traded under theO2 and BE brands. The deal saw BSkyB agree to pay £180 million initially, followed by a further £20 million after all customers had been transferred to Sky's existing business. The sale was subject to regulatory approval in April 2013,[3] and was subsequently approved by theOffice of Fair Trading on 16 May 2013.[4]
BE offeredADSL2+ broadband services throughBT'stelephone exchanges viaLocal Loop Unbundling (LLU), with advertised speeds of up to 16 Mbit/sdownstream and 1.9 Mbit/supstream, subject to Annex M enablement, line length and quality,[5] making BE's network the fastest mainstream, and first[6] ADSL2+ ISP in Britain during its nine-year existence. Although BE's services were initially only available in selected parts ofLondon,Manchester andBirmingham, it underwent a programme of rapid expansion across the UK making it available in at least 1,256 of the UK's telephone exchanges by 2012.[7][8]
All three levels of non-bonded ADSL service came provided with a leased "BE Box", a brandedTechnicolor (formerlyThomson)SpeedTouch router. Internet access was unlimited and offered uncappedbandwidth usage subject to compliance with one of the industry's more lenientFair Usage policies. Uncapped services are currently quite unusual from UK-basedISPs due to the high cost of backhaul over BT's core backhaul network (BE used an independentLevel3/GlobalCrossing backhaul, peering primarily atLINX). BE did not stipulate monthly bandwidth usage restrictions in its small print, however it was known to take action against a number of users due to dramatically excessive usage where other customers' access was affected. Such action was reported to include disconnecting customers on congested exchange who consumed over oneterabyte of data in a month.[9][10] This was in line with its policy which stated that it would take action against users whose usage is '...so excessive that other members are detrimentally affected' at its discretion.[11]
To receive BE broadband, customers were required to have an active and compatibletelephone lines provided by either BE, a service which it offered from 2010, orBT Wholesale reseller such as BT or the Post Office's Home Phone service.Fully unbundled telephone lines from companies such asTalkTalk orSky were not compatible.
The majority of users who were 500 metres or less from their local telephone exchanges were expected to achieve connection speeds close to the advertised maximum; with Annex M and interleaving disabled ('fastpath') on a 300-metre loop length, a sync speed of 24 Mbit/sdownstream and 2.5 Mbit/supstream was easily achievable.
BE's service utilised ADSL2+ (ITU G.992.5) and was one of the few UK ISPs to offer theAnnex M extension to increase upload speeds anywhere up to the full technical maximum of ~2 Mbit/s for itsBE Pro customers. The end user's router communicated with the telephone exchange usingEthernet overATM (ETHoA,RFC 1483).
One of BE's advertised claims was that it did not carry outtraffic shaping in any way and that traffic was only limited by available bandwidth and by any congestion at the local exchange. BE did, however, block SMTP traffic overport 25 to and from external destinations for users with dynamic IP addresses in order to prevent its dynamicIP pool beingblacklisted. The result was that a user with a dynamic IP address could only use BE's own SMTP server or one configured to use non-standard ports for sending email. Users who wished to host their own mail server were required to subscribe to a service with a static IP address.
On 15 October 2007O2, also owned by parent company Telefónica Europe, launched its own broadband product delivered over the BE network infrastructure. In effect, this resulted in two broadband companies delivering services over a platform on which previously only one company was operating. This, coupled with the fact that there were officially over three times the number of subscribers using the platform since the launch of O2Broadband,[12] caused some BE users to voice concerns over the future performance, stability and contention of the service. Such concerns were generally groundless as BE upgraded its network capacity to accommodate new customers.[13]
In addition to the BE and O2 brands being delivered over the same network, since 10 March 2008, BE/O2 resoldwholesale access to its network to other providers.[14] The first of these companies was Vaioni,[15] which launched an "up to 20 Mbit/s business class ADSL2+ service" featuring up to 2.5 Mbit/s upstream and a guaranteed 10:1 contention ratio with prices starting from £140.99 per month. Vaioni's product, branded 'Ultra 20', was aimed at small to medium-sized businesses and schools.
In August 2009 the UK ISPAndrews & Arnold entered into an agreement to use BE's core and LLU networks to augment BT's legacy 20CN and21CN infrastructure.[16] By the time that BE was sold to BSkyB in 2013 many other business connectivity providers offered BE wholesale services.
On 6 October 2011, BE announced an overhaul of its core network to increase bandwidth, prepare for a transition toIPv6 and improve network resiliency. During this time customers with static and dynamic IP addresses were assigned new addresses; BE took the approach of rebuilding its entire network, migrating customers, changing IP address blocks and incurring a small one-off period of downtime during an end user's migration. This migration was implemented in phases with a transitional period with both old and new network settings operating concurrently.
BE also changed its methods of assigning static IP addresses, selling netblocks of one, six and fourteen as opposed to the old system of a group of addresses from a pool of arbitrarily available IPs. Customers were planned to be migrated over a six to eight months period.[17]
In late June 2011, BE's managing director Chris Stening announced a fibre optic service to directly compete with BT Infinity. This service would also utilise FTTC technology, one of the new generationFibre to theX technologies, with speeds and pricing yet to be determined.[18][19] BE updated customers on their progress in September 2011; but whilst receiving 'thousands' of pre-registrations, as of late 2011 they had yet to partner with a suitable company operating a national fibre network to allow them to offer the level of service desired.[20]
On 8 November 2011, BE customers who pre-registered for fibre received an email informing them of a single-exchange trial. BE would install its own equipment in BT's Barking exchange, as there were sufficient BE users in the area and FTTC was readily available viaOpenreach. A shortlist of 25 people was to be gathered, from which an initial 10 testers would be secured. They would then submit regular feedback over a period of up to six months, sharing their experiences publicly via the BE Blog. The new service was specified as using Openreach GEA (Generic Ethernet Access), allowing data from BT to be transferred to BE'sDSLAM equipment instead of routing it to a Point of Presence (PoP) via BT's core network.[21][22]
By the end of 2012, only staff and a small number of customers on a single exchange had participated in limited trials and in April 2012 BE announced that it was unlikely to launch a fibre product in 2012 but hoped to do so on a limited basis at an unspecified future date.[23]
After the sale of BE to BSkyB in March 2013, BSkyB announced that the BE and O2 networks were to close and that customers would be migrated over to the existingSky Broadband service.[24][25] This resulted in the closure of BE's email and website hosting services, the discontinuation of line bonding, multiple static IPs and Annex M as well as the closure of the BE/O2 Wholesale network.[26][27][28] Users were also gifted their existing loaned Be-Boxes.[29] Many users however had concerns with becoming Sky customers and decided to leave rather than migrate. To try and accommodate some of their concerns Sky worked to integrate both static IP addresses and control over line profiles into their own network and launched this new service as 'Sky Broadband Unlimited Pro'.[30]
