Be Un Limited

» see bethere.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Be Un Limited was incorporated on 18 October 2004 and started selling lines in August 2005, by which point it had done the expensive thing: put its own ADSL2+ equipment into BT's exchanges rather than reselling someone else's capacity. The line it sold on the back of that was billed as Britain's first consumer connection rated at up to 24 megabits, in a market where 8 was the headline number. By mid-2006 the kit was in around 150 exchanges with four hundred planned.

Everything about the service was aimed at the kind of customer who reads the small print. You got static IP addresses, several of them if you asked, and you could turn on Annex M, which traded a little download speed for a much better upload. Line bonding was available too. There was no traffic shaping and no throttling of particular protocols at particular hours, which in the Britain of 2006 was close to a political position. The router was a leased Thomson box that everyone called the BE Box.

Telefónica's O2 bought the company on 20 June 2006 for 50 million pounds. Be had about ten thousand customers at the time, so the purchase was the network and the engineering, not the subscriber book. O2 launched its own consumer broadband on top of Be's platform in October 2007 and left the BE brand running beside it for another six years.

~ the dossier ~

~ what 24 megabits meant in Turkey ~

Nothing like this was on sale where I lived. I had been on TTNet since broadband replaced the dial-up account around 2006, and the Turkish market of the late 2000s was a short list of speed tiers from one incumbent, with the unbundled competitors mostly serving business addresses. A static IP belonged to a business contract. Home lines got whatever the pool handed out that week. The British enthusiast argument of that era, about shaping policies and which ISP would let you run a server off your own line, was an argument I read and could not join.

Be's reputation inside that argument was unusually good for an ISP. The support staff had a nickname and the user group ran its own forum, where the company answered technical questions in public. That is a low bar and almost nobody clears it.

~ sold twice, counted once ~

O2 and BE's home broadband peaked together at 671,600 lines in December 2010 and was down to 519,400 by the final quarter O2 reported, with 560,100 on the books at the end of 2012. On 1 March 2013 Sky agreed to buy the whole fixed-line consumer business for 180 million pounds plus another 20 million once the customers had been moved. The legal entity called Be Un Limited was renamed Sky Home Communications Limited on 30 April 2013, and that rename is the only paperwork resembling a death certificate: the registration is still active today under the Sky name.

Sky began migrating in October 2013 and told anyone who refused to move that they could stay until spring 2014, "when we will be switching these off". The wholesale platform was scheduled for closure that February. Neither Annex M nor the multiple static addresses survived the transfer. What replaced them was a premium Sky tier carrying one fixed address.

The last dated event is email. On 6 June 2014 Sky confirmed the BE mailboxes and the customer web space would close on 31 July. The final archived capture of bethere.co.uk, from 12 July 2014, carries a notice that the brand had been bought and renamed and that for now it continued to operate in exactly the same way. Nineteen days of that remained.

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