Not What You Meant? There are 35 definitions for BE.

Be Unlimited

About 3 pages (940 words)

Know this topic well? Help others and get FREE products!

Be Unlimited

Type	ISP
Founded	2004
Headquarters	London
Key people	Dana Pressman, Per-Gunnar Ostby, Brett Coles
Industry	Internet & Communications
Products	Broadband
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). 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 818 of the UK's telephone exchanges (14.7% of the total 5,564 ADSL-enabled exchanges in the UK).^[1]^[2]

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

Company history and key dates

The company was founded in October 2004 and started trading in August 2005 as a privately-owned limited company.^[3] On 20 June 2006, Spanish owned mobile phone company O2 purchased Be for £50 million,^[4] leaving its management and product offering intact. In 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.^[5]^[6] As of October 2007, Be has 818 exchanges enabled for its services, and is waiting to enable 15 more across the UK.^[7] In October 2007 Be dramatically cut the prices of its two unlimited high-speed broadband packages, Be Unlimited and Be Pro, resulting in 24Mbit/s broadband becoming cheaper than many 8 Mbit/s packages. 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.

Product offering

Be currently offer three different levels of ADSL, distinguished mainly by their download/upload speeds.^[9]

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 static IP address)
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. All three levels of service come provided with a leased "Be Box" (a branded Thomson SpeedTouch 780WL router), capable of carrying VoIP, 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. Their policy states they will only take action against users whose usage is '...so excessive that other members are detrimentally affected'.^[10] 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. Upon termination of the contract, the Be Box must be returned.

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. Users must subscribe to a service with a static IP address in order to use a different SMTP server or host an e-mail server on their own local network.