Be Unlimited
Encyclopedia
BE Un Limited is an Internet service provider
in the United Kingdom
with the trading names "Be There", BE Unlimited or simply BE. It is part of Spanish group Telefónica Europe, who also own O2
.
BE offers ADSL2+ services through BT's
telephone exchange
s via Local Loop Unbundling
(LLU), with advertised speeds of up to 24 Mbit/s downstream
and 2.5 Mbit/s upstream
(subject to line length and quality), which would make BE the fastest mainstream ADSL 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 1,247 of the UK's telephone exchanges.
SpeedTouch
router) and unlimited/uncapped bandwidth usage
subject to compliance with a Fair Usage Policy
. Uncapped services are currently quite unusual from UK-based ISPs
. BE does not stipulate any such restrictions in their small print, however BE has taken action against one user for excessive usage . Their policy states they will take action against users whose usage is '...so excessive that other members are detrimentally affected'.
One must have an active compatible telephone line
to receive the service(either provided by either BE or BT or a reseller such as the Post Office). The majority of users who are 600 m or less from their local telephone exchange should achieve connection speeds close to the advertised maximum.
), 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 blacklist
ed. 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, users need to use ports 465 or 587, or to 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 October 15, 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, has caused many BE users to voice concerns over the future performance, stability and contention of the service.
In addition, from March 10, 2008, BE/O2 are now reselling wholesale access to their network to other providers. The first of these companies is Vaioni, 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', is aimed at small- to medium-sized companies and schools.
In August 2009 the UK ISP Andrews & Arnold
entered into an agreement to use BE's core and LLU networks to augment BT's legacy 20CN and 21CN infrastructure.
On the 6th October 2011, BE announced an overhaul of their core network to increase their bandwidth, prepare for a transition to IPv6 and improve their network resiliency. During this time customers with static and dynamic IP addresses will be assigned new addresses. BE are taking the approach of rebuilding their entire network, and will therefore be migrating customers, thus the change of IP addresses and downtime. They will also be changing their methods of assigning static IP addresses, by selling netblocks of one, six and fourteen. Work will begin early next year and customers will be migrated six to seven months after.
On the 8th November 2011, BE customers who pre-registered for fibre received an email informing customers of a single-exchange trial. They will install their own equipment in BT's Barking exchange, as there are a number of BE users on this exchange and FTTC is readily available from BT Openreach. A shortlist of 25 people will be gathered, from which an initial 10 testers will be secured. They will submit regular feedback over a period of up to six months, sharing their experiences publicly via the BE blog. The new service will use BT Openreach GEA (Generic Ethernet Access) allowing data from BT to be transferred to BE's DSLAM equipment, instead of routing it to a PoP via BT's network.
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
with the trading names "Be There", BE Unlimited or simply BE. It is part of Spanish group Telefónica Europe, who also own O2
O2 (United Kingdom)
Telefónica UK Limited is a telecommunications, internet and financial services provider in the United Kingdom owned by Telefónica, forming part of its Telefónica Europe division...
.
BE offers ADSL2+ services through BT's
BT Group
BT Group plc is a global telecommunications services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world and has operations in more than 170 countries. Through its BT Global Services division it is a major supplier of...
telephone exchange
Telephone exchange
In the field of telecommunications, a telephone exchange or telephone switch is a system of electronic components that connects telephone calls...
s via Local Loop Unbundling
Local loop unbundling
Local loop unbundling is the regulatory process of allowing multiple telecommunications operators to use connections from the telephone exchange to the customer's premises...
(LLU), with advertised speeds of up to 24 Mbit/s downstream
Downstream (computer science)
In a telecommunications network or computer network, downstream refers to data sent from a network service provider to a customer.Although the best voiceband modems are called 56 kbit/s modems, downstream speeds can be limited to a few tens of kilobits per second with even lower upstream speeds...
and 2.5 Mbit/s upstream
Upstream (networking)
In computer networking, upstream refers to the direction in which data can be transferred from the client to the server . This differs greatly from downstream not only in theory and usage, but also in that upstream speeds are usually at a premium...
(subject to line length and quality), which would make BE the fastest mainstream ADSL ISP in Britain. Although its services were initially only available in selected parts of London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
and Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
, BE has undergone a program of rapid expansion across the UK, and is now available in 1,247 of the UK's telephone exchanges.
Services and Fair Use Policy
All three levels of non-bonded ADSL service come provided with a leased "BE Box" (a branded ThomsonThomson SA
Technicolor SA , formerly Thomson SA and Thomson Multimedia, is a French international provider of solutions for the creation, management, post-production, delivery and access of video, for the Communication, Media and Entertainment industries. Technicolor’s headquarters are located in Issy les...
SpeedTouch
SpeedTouch
SpeedTouch is the brand name of a line of networking equipment produced by Alcatel and Technicolor SA. Before 27 January 2010 Technicolor was known as Thomson SA....
router) and unlimited/uncapped bandwidth usage
Bandwidth management
Bandwidth management is the process of measuring and controlling the communications on a network link, to avoid filling the link to capacity or overfilling the link, which would result in network congestion and poor performance of the network.- Management :Bandwidth management mechanisms may be...
subject to compliance with a Fair Usage Policy
Acceptable use policy
An acceptable use policy is a set of rules applied by the owner/manager of a network, website or large computer system that restrict the ways in which the network site or system may be used...
. Uncapped services are currently quite unusual from UK-based ISPs
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
. BE does not stipulate any such restrictions in their small print, however BE has taken action against one user for excessive usage . Their policy states they will take action against users whose usage is '...so excessive that other members are detrimentally affected'.
One must have an active compatible telephone line
Telephone line
A telephone line or telephone circuit is a single-user circuit on a telephone communication system...
to receive the service(either provided by either BE or BT or a reseller such as the Post Office). The majority of users who are 600 m or less from their local telephone exchange should achieve connection speeds close to the advertised maximum.
Platform and technical information
BE's service is delivered over ADSL2+ (ITU G.992.5ITU G.992.5
ITU G.992.5 is an ITU standard, also referred to as ADSL2+ or ADSL2Plus. Commercially it is notable for its maximum theoretical download speed of 24 Mbit/s.-Technical information:...
), utilizing the Annex M
ITU G.992.5 Annex M
Annex M is an optional specification in ITU-T recommendations G.992.3 and G.992.5 , also referred to as ADSL2 M and ADSL2+ M. This specification extends the capability of commonly deployed Annex A by more than doubling the number of upstream bits...
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
Ethernet
Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....
over ATM
Asynchronous Transfer Mode
Asynchronous Transfer Mode is a standard switching technique designed to unify telecommunication and computer networks. It uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing, and it encodes data into small, fixed-sized cells. This differs from approaches such as the Internet Protocol or Ethernet that...
(ETHoA, RFC 1483).
Unusually for a UK ISP, the company does not shape traffic
Traffic shaping
Traffic shaping is the control of computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, improve latency, and/or increase usable bandwidth for some kinds of packets by delaying other kinds of packets that meet certain criteria...
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
Address pool
In the context of the Internet addressing structure, an address pool is a set of Internet Protocol addresses available at any level in the IP address allocation hierarchy. At the top level, the IP address pool is managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority...
being blacklist
Blacklist (computing)
In computing, a blacklist or block list is a basic access control mechanism that allows everyone access, except for the members of the black list . The opposite is a whitelist, which means allow nobody, except members of the white list...
ed. 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, users need to use ports 465 or 587, or to 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 October 15, 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, has caused many BE users to voice concerns over the future performance, stability and contention of the service.
In addition, from March 10, 2008, BE/O2 are now reselling wholesale access to their network to other providers. The first of these companies is Vaioni, 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', is aimed at small- to medium-sized companies and schools.
In August 2009 the UK ISP Andrews & Arnold
Andrews & Arnold
Andrews & Arnold Ltd is an Internet service provider based in Bracknell in the United Kingdom founded in 1997 and launched in 1998, primarily serving businesses and "technical" home users....
entered into an agreement to use BE's core and LLU networks to augment BT's legacy 20CN and 21CN infrastructure.
On the 6th October 2011, BE announced an overhaul of their core network to increase their bandwidth, prepare for a transition to IPv6 and improve their network resiliency. During this time customers with static and dynamic IP addresses will be assigned new addresses. BE are taking the approach of rebuilding their entire network, and will therefore be migrating customers, thus the change of IP addresses and downtime. They will also be changing their methods of assigning static IP addresses, by selling netblocks of one, six and fourteen. Work will begin early next year and customers will be migrated six to seven months after.
FTTC
In late June 2011 Chris Stening, BE's managing director announced a fibre optic service that will directly compete with BT Infinity. This service will utilise FTTC technology - one of the new generation Fiber to the x technologies, with speeds and pricing yet to be determined. They are currently accepting pre-registration, and aim to launch the service later this year. BE updated customers on their progress in September 2011. They have received thousands of pre-registrations however they are yet to partner with a company that offers an existing fibre network. They aim to launch this service later this year, and are trialling it with their staff.On the 8th November 2011, BE customers who pre-registered for fibre received an email informing customers of a single-exchange trial. They will install their own equipment in BT's Barking exchange, as there are a number of BE users on this exchange and FTTC is readily available from BT Openreach. A shortlist of 25 people will be gathered, from which an initial 10 testers will be secured. They will submit regular feedback over a period of up to six months, sharing their experiences publicly via the BE blog. The new service will use BT Openreach GEA (Generic Ethernet Access) allowing data from BT to be transferred to BE's DSLAM equipment, instead of routing it to a PoP via BT's network.
External links
- BE service status
- BE supported unofficial live IRC support chat
- BE Usergroup contains live customer support statistics, technical wiki and other tools
- BE Unlimited national LLU statistics
- BEs Network Overhaul
- Update on Fibre
- BE Fibre Trial Email
- FTTC Trial Q&A