According to our inbox, Norsemen have taken our local broadband/VoIP provider! Minnesota's Best Buy just announced it dropped $97 million on the purchase of Speakeasy. But as Speakeasy CEO Bruce Chatterley says in the email to us loyal Speakeasy customers:

It is important to note that though Speakeasy will now be a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy, we will continue to operate as a standalone, independent operating division with headquarters in Seattle.

That's good, because Speakeasy employs some 300 people. The Seattle Times and the P-I have the story -- the P-I notes, ironically enough, that although it's a local company, most of Speakeasy's 46,000 customers reside in the Bay Area and New York. Still, their can-do attitude (including coming back from the great Speakeasy cafe fire of 2001) won them fans around here, as Seattlest Dan points out:

Speakeasy was always the geek's ISP of choice in Seattle. If you had bandwidth needs above and beyond what cable or DSL (or ADSL or whatever you could get to your house at that time) Speakeasy would hook you up. Need a static IP address? Need two? Most providers would transfer you to some business unit that would ultimately tell you that that kind of service wasn't available to your apartment in Wallingford. At Speakeasy, it was possible. You'd pay for it, of course, but it was possible.

That's the reason we're using Speakeasy right now to upload this post -- because Qwest, while in fact servicing the building we work in, does not realize that it services the building we work in. We tried to convince Qwest salespeople that they do, but they refused to believe it and transferred us to an engineer who could explain why they didn't. Researching, the Qwest engineer found out they did and offered to set us up, but then their phone system dropped our call and since we'd been transferred there, we had no way to get back. Enter Speakeasy.

The rationale from Best Buy is that they're purchasing Speakeasy as part of their Best Buy for Business subdivision, aimed at small business owners. Best Buy claims that all the cool small biz types want VoIP, and look, Speakeasy was just sitting there. (Seattlest James point out this is not the first time the Nordic Best Buyers have raided Seattle: they also sacked Kent's Magnolia Audio Video a few years ago.) Reading between the lines, it looks like Speakeasy was out "looking for a buyer" (if you get our drift) as soon as they got profitable last year. They were all, "God, we'd love it if somebody felt like stopping in and pillaging." And today that dream has come true.