BE offers wholesale alternative to BT broadband

BE says it plans to give BT a run for its money in the broadband market, by offering ISPs wholesale access to its network.

The country's telephone exchanges

BE has its own ADSL2+ equipment installed in more than 1,300 of the country's telephone exchanges, giving it coverage of around 70% of the population. The company will now rent that network on a wholesale basis to smaller ISPs, predominantly those targeting businesses.

BE claims it has one big business advantage over BT's network: higher speeds. "The broadband market has been left one-dimensional by the opposition," Dan Cunliffe, head of BE Wholesale told PC Pro. "The difference with our product is that we nurture our network quite aggressively - we have a 30% overhead on our network at all times."

Cunliffe also claimed that BE's network will offer 30% faster upload speeds than BT, with every connection capable of delivering a 2.5Mbits/sec uplink. "Uploading is vital to UK businesses," he said, especially for businesses running VoIP applications.