After a long wait Sky Broadband has finally become the latest UK ISP to introduce an ultrafast and superfast broadband package based off Openreach’s Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, but sadly this will initially take the form of a small scale pilot and is currently only available to a number of FTTP eligible homes.
At present Sky already sells an “Ultrafast 1” (145Mbps average speed) package using Openreach’s hybrid fibre G.fast technology (covers 2.81m premises), but they’ve also been busy working on a national FTTP service. In fact it looked as if they were about to launch it earlier this year when COVID-19 (Coronavirus) hit and effectively stalled almost all new FTTP installs, until now (here).
Openreach are now slowly restarting some of their normal engineering operations and, alongside that, Sky Broadband has decided to launch pilot their FTTP products. We were expecting something more substantial than this but Sky has instead informed ISPreview.co.uk that they will be rolling out FTTP on a wider scale over the coming months.
Otherwise the pilot currently appears to be largely mirroring Sky’s existing FTTC (e.g. 80Mbps tier) and G.fast plans (e.g. £39 per month for 145Mbps), although we believe that faster packages will follow in the future (hopefully later this year once they exit the pilot phase). At this time we have not been told precisely which homes are eligible for the pilot and two people who attempted to make an order (over the phone) yesterday were rejected.
Otherwise Sky’s FTTP based packages include the usual array of unlimited usage, service features and new customers will also receive their latest Sky Broadband Hub (SR203) router. Just don’t expect them to be promoting these in public for awhile.
NOTE: FTTP lines don’t suffer the same signal (performance) degradation over distance as FTTC or G.fast, so you’ll get closer to the advertised average speeds.
