Be Unlimited

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Be Unlimited

Type	ISP
Founded	2004
Headquarters	London
Key people	Felix Geyr, Oli White, Joachim Garmer, Sanjay Khatri, Tom Williams, Brett Coles^[1]
Industry	Internet & Communications
Products	Broadband
Owner	Telefónica O2
Website	www.bethere.co.uk

Be Unlimited, or simply "Be", is a growing UK Internet service provider. Be Unlimited and Be are trading names of Be Un Limited.

Be offers ADSL2+ services through BT's telephone exchanges via Local Loop Unbundling (LLU), with speeds of up to 24 Mbit/s downstream and 2.5 Mbit/s upstream (subject to line length and quality), which makes Be the fastest mainstream ISP in Britain. Although its services were initially only available in selected parts of London, Manchester and Birmingham, Be has undergone a program of rapid expansion across the UK, and is now available in 1,004 of the UK's telephone exchanges.^[2]^[3]

1 Company history and key dates
2 Product offering
3 Platform and technical information
4 External links
5 References

[edit] Company history and key dates

October 2004 - the company was founded.

August 2005 - the company started trading as a privately-owned limited company.^[4]

20 June 2006 - Spanish owned mobile phone company O2 plc purchased Be for £50 million,^[5] leaving its management and product offering intact.

February 2007 - a vulnerability in Be's routers was made public (having been brought to the company's attention in March 2006) exposing subscriber networks to remote attacks.^[6]^[7]

October 2007 - Be dramatically cuts the prices of its two unlimited high-speed broadband packages, Be Unlimited and Be Pro, resulting in 24Mbit/s broadband becoming cheaper than many 8Mbit/s packages available elsewhere in the UK broadband market. The move prompted industry experts to speculate^[8] that the price cuts had the potential to shake up the UK broadband market with 8 Mbit/s providers being forced to justify their prices in the face of cheaper rates by a faster provider.

15 October 2007 - O2 Broadband launches its own branded product, delivered over the existing Be network infrastructure.^[9]

8 November 2007 - shortly after the launch of O2's branded broadband product, Be's founding Managing Director, Dana Pressman, announces her resignation. Felix Geyr, former Head of Business Strategy for O2, is appointed Managing Director.

5 March 2008 - in a strong push to grow service availability, Be/O2 places 400 orders with BT Openreach to enable more exchanges across the country^[10]. As of 19 March 2008, Be/O2 now have 921 exchanges enabled for its service, and a further 301 exchanges will soon be enabled.^[11]

10 March 2008 - Be/O2 opens its network on a wholesale basis to third party ISP resellers for the first time. Vaioni launches a branded service 'Ultra 20', utilizing Be/O2's network infrastructure, aimed at companies and schools.

[edit] Product offering

Be currently offer three different levels of ADSL, distinguished mainly by their download/upload speeds.^[12]

Be value - up to 8 Mbit/s download/up to 1.3 Mbit/s upload, priced at £14 per month (with 1 dynamic IP address)
Be unlimited - up to 24Mbit/s download/up to 1.3 Mbit/s upload, priced at £18 per month (with 1 dynamic IP address as standard, but with the option of 1 static IP address at no extra charge)
Be pro - up to 24Mbit/s download/up to 2.5 Mbit/s upload (utilizing the Annex M extension), priced at £22 per month (with 1 static IP address)

In addition, Be pro users can purchase 7 additional IP addresses (resulting in a total of 8) for an extra £10 per month, or 15 additional IP addresses (resulting in a total of 16) for an extra £20 per month.

Hosted webspace and email can be purchased for an additional £2/month.
Be also offer a home CCTV solution called Be Home Monitor which carries a fee of £5/month (and a one-off setup fee of £100). To facilitate this service, Be provide an IP Camera, access to a web portal to view camera activity and real-time alerts by email and SMS.

All three levels of ADSL service come provided with a leased "Be Box" (a branded Thomson SpeedTouch router) and an unlimited/uncapped bandwidth usage (subject to compliance with a Fair Usage Policy). Uncapped services are currently quite unusual from UK-based ISPs. Some ISPs claim to provide an "unlimited" service but have set bandwidth restrictions hidden away in their Fair Usage Policies. Be does not stipulate any such restrictions in their small print, and has only very rarely taken action against users^{[citation needed]}. Their policy states they will only take action against users whose usage is '...so excessive that other members are detrimentally affected'.^[13]

You must have a BT telephone line to receive service. The majority of users who are 1km or less from their local telephone exchange should achieve connection speeds close to the advertised maximum. Be charge £24 for connection to their network. Subscribers to Be value have a 12 month minimum contract period with a one month cancellation notice period thereafter, whereas Be unlimited and Be pro users are on a rolling contract of no minimum period but must provide 3 months cancellation notice (or pay £40 for express cancellation which will cancel the service within 10 days). Upon termination of the contract, the Be Box must be returned (or bought for £50).

[edit] Platform and technical information

Be's service is delivered over ADSL2+ (ITU G.992.5), utilizing the Annex M extension to increase the upload speed anywhere up to 2.5 Mbit/s for Be pro users. The end user's router transmits data to and from the telephone exchange using Ethernet over ATM (ETHoA, RFC 1483).

Unusually for a UK ISP, the company does not shape traffic in any way. Traffic is only limited by available bandwidth and by any congestion at the local exchange. Be block port 25 (SMTP) packets to and from external destinations for users with dynamic IP addresses in order to prevent their dynamic IP pool being blacklisted. The result is that users with a dynamic IP address can only use Be's SMTP server for sending email. In order to use a different SMTP server, or host an e-mail server on their own local network, users must subscribe to a service with a static IP address.

Parent company O2 launched their own broadband product on 15 October 2007. Connections on the O2 Broadband brand are also delivered over the Be network infrastructure, in effect resulting in two broadband companies delivering services over a platform on which previously only one company was operating. This, coupled with the fact that there are now officially over three times the number of subscribers using the platform since the launch of O2 Broadband^[14], has caused many Be users to voice concerns over the future performance, stability and contention of the service^[15].

In addition, from 10 March 2008, Be/O2 are now reselling wholesale access to their network to other providers^[16]. The first of these companies is Vaioni^[17], who have 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', will be aimed at small- to medium-sized companies and schools.

Be in fact charge a £100 fee for 'non return of equipment' and provide varying details as to where the equipment should be returned should you not wish to 'purchase' it for that price.