Sky reduces prices on fibre broadband in York

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Sky offering cut-price next-generation broadband in York

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Sky are increasing their fibre-to-the-premises foothold in York, North Yorkshire but also are reducing the price of these services for households along with marketing the services as “Ultra Fibre Optic” services. This is based on infrastructure being rolled out by them, TalkTalk and CityFibre across that city/

They were asked about whether they have a plan to build out their own FTTP infrastructure across the UK but had denied having that kind of ambition. But they are running separate FTTP pilot deployments across Basingstoke and Derbyshire with the same kind of technology, products and tariff charts.

Sky’s cut-price plans offer in common unlimited data use along with a router being supplied although customers have to fork out GBP£6.95 for delivery.

The plans are listed below:

• 50Mbps for GBP£5 per month for 12 months, GBP£10 per month therafter
• 100Mbps for GBP£10 per month for 6 months, GBP£20 per month thereafter
• 940Mbps for GBP£20 per month for 6 months, GBP£30 per month thereafter

The customers are still charged the GBP£17.40 line rental, which has raised questions for an FTTH/P service run by Sky, TalkTalk and CityFibre. Here the question that may be raised is that if BT Openreach had anything to do with this, they may have had Sky put this in their tariff charts.

If Sky is a TV-content supplier, they could be in a position to run a single-pipe multiple-play service with their pay-TV content delivered via the fibre-optic infrastructure which could allow for the satellite dishes to go from the balconies. As well, it can become a foothold for Sky to roll out 4K UHDTV services to their customers as television is heading down that path.

The issue of the line-rental charge is still a thorny issue for a lot of UK providers because there isn’t a way to allow ISPs to provide a “naked” or “dry-loop” service where you don’t have to pay BT line-rental charges. On the other hand, Sky could start offering telephony over the fibre services for those of us who value the landline telephone service.

But what is happening is that some providers are reducing the price of fibre-to-the-premises next-generation broadband so as to allow users to justify taking advantage of the high speeds that it offers.