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Be Un Limited
Be Unlimited (also traded as Be There or simply BE and latterly known legally as Sky Home Communications Limited) was an Internet service provider in the United Kingdom between 2004 and 2014. Initially founded as an independent company by Boris Ivanovic and Dana Tobak in 2005, it was bought by Spanish group Telefónica Europe in 2006 before being sold on to BSkyB 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 the O2 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, and was subsequently approved by the Office of Fair Trading on 16 May 2013.
BE offered ADSL2+ broadband services through BT's telephone exchanges via Local Loop Unbundling (LLU), with advertised speeds of up to 16 Mbit/s downstream and 1.9 Mbit/s upstream, subject to Annex M enablement, line length and quality, making BE's network the fastest mainstream, and first ADSL2+ ISP in Britain during its nine-year existence. Although BE's services were initially only available in selected parts of London, Manchester and Birmingham, 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.[citation needed]
All three levels of non-bonded ADSL service came provided with a leased "BE Box", a branded Technicolor (formerly Thomson) SpeedTouch router. Internet access was unlimited and offered uncapped bandwidth usage subject to compliance with one of the industry's more lenient Fair Usage policies. Uncapped services are currently quite unusual from UK-based ISPs due to the high cost of backhaul over BT's core backhaul network (BE used an independent Level3/GlobalCrossing backhaul, peering primarily at LINX). 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 one terabyte of data in a month. 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.
To receive BE broadband, customers were required to have an active and compatible telephone lines provided by either BE, a service which it offered from 2010, or BT Wholesale reseller such as BT or the Post Office's Home Phone service. Fully unbundled telephone lines from companies such as TalkTalk or Sky 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/s downstream and 2.5 Mbit/s upstream was easily achievable.
BE's service utilised ADSL2+ (ITU G.992.5) and was one of the few UK ISPs to offer the Annex M extension to increase upload speeds anywhere up to the full technical maximum of ~2 Mbit/s for its BE Pro customers. The end user's router communicated with the telephone exchange using Ethernet over ATM (ETHoA, RFC 1483).
One of BE's advertised claims was that it did not carry out traffic 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 over port 25 to and from external destinations for users with dynamic IP addresses in order to prevent its dynamic IP pool being blacklisted. 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 2007 O2, 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, 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.
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Be Un Limited
Be Unlimited (also traded as Be There or simply BE and latterly known legally as Sky Home Communications Limited) was an Internet service provider in the United Kingdom between 2004 and 2014. Initially founded as an independent company by Boris Ivanovic and Dana Tobak in 2005, it was bought by Spanish group Telefónica Europe in 2006 before being sold on to BSkyB 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 the O2 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, and was subsequently approved by the Office of Fair Trading on 16 May 2013.
BE offered ADSL2+ broadband services through BT's telephone exchanges via Local Loop Unbundling (LLU), with advertised speeds of up to 16 Mbit/s downstream and 1.9 Mbit/s upstream, subject to Annex M enablement, line length and quality, making BE's network the fastest mainstream, and first ADSL2+ ISP in Britain during its nine-year existence. Although BE's services were initially only available in selected parts of London, Manchester and Birmingham, 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.[citation needed]
All three levels of non-bonded ADSL service came provided with a leased "BE Box", a branded Technicolor (formerly Thomson) SpeedTouch router. Internet access was unlimited and offered uncapped bandwidth usage subject to compliance with one of the industry's more lenient Fair Usage policies. Uncapped services are currently quite unusual from UK-based ISPs due to the high cost of backhaul over BT's core backhaul network (BE used an independent Level3/GlobalCrossing backhaul, peering primarily at LINX). 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 one terabyte of data in a month. 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.
To receive BE broadband, customers were required to have an active and compatible telephone lines provided by either BE, a service which it offered from 2010, or BT Wholesale reseller such as BT or the Post Office's Home Phone service. Fully unbundled telephone lines from companies such as TalkTalk or Sky 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/s downstream and 2.5 Mbit/s upstream was easily achievable.
BE's service utilised ADSL2+ (ITU G.992.5) and was one of the few UK ISPs to offer the Annex M extension to increase upload speeds anywhere up to the full technical maximum of ~2 Mbit/s for its BE Pro customers. The end user's router communicated with the telephone exchange using Ethernet over ATM (ETHoA, RFC 1483).
One of BE's advertised claims was that it did not carry out traffic 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 over port 25 to and from external destinations for users with dynamic IP addresses in order to prevent its dynamic IP pool being blacklisted. 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 2007 O2, 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, 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.