Be Un Limited
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| ISP | |
| Industry | Internet & Communications |
| Fate | Bought by Sky with all customers transferred |
| Founded | 2005 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
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Key people
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Carolyn Hewitt, Daniel Cunliffe, Louise Kirlew |
| Products | Broadband |
| Owner | Sky plc |
| Website | www |
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.
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.
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Wikipedia