Sky Broadband Cuts Ultra Fibre Optic FTTH Pilot Service Price in York UK

Sky Broadband appears to have sharply reduced the price of their 50-940Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) based “Ultra Fibre Optic” (UFO) broadband packages in the city of York (North Yorkshire), which is still being jointly rolled out alongside partners TalkTalk and Cityfibre.

As a quick recap, around 20,000 premises (Phase One) in the northern half of York should soon be covered by the new network, which is being supported by an investment of £5m each from Sky and TalkTalk. Sky also have a couple of separate pilots in Basingstoke (here) and Derbyshire (here), which use the same technology and a similar product selection.

However there’s currently a huge question mark over the future of Sky’s FTTH/P deployment in York or indeed anywhere else in the United Kingdom. The reason for this stems from an April 2016 statement by Sky’s CEO, Jeremy Darroch, who officially ruled the operator out from any ambition to build its own national FTTH/P network in the United Kingdom (here).

Despite all of this Sky still appears to be taking the marketing side seriously and as such they’ve cut the price of their packages in order to make them more attractive to local residents, with the slowest two options being offered at half-price. Mind you there’s oddly still a standard line rental charge of £17.40 per month that must be added on top.

Sky Ultra Fibre Optic
* 50Mbps “Guaranteed Speeds”
* Totally unlimited usage
* Included router (£6.95 delivery charge)
* 12 Month contract

PRICE: £5 per month for 12 months (£10 thereafter) + line rental

Sky Ultra Fibre Optic Plus
* As above, but with..
* 100Mbps

PRICE: £10 per month for 6 months (£20 thereafter) + line rental

Sky Ultra Fibre Optic Pro
* As above, but with..
* ‘up to’ 940Mbps

PRICE: £20 per month for 6 months (£30 thereafter) + line rental

NOTE: The so-called “Guaranteed Speeds” are only to the router, which is intended to avoid the impact of poor local WiFi or wired LAN performance on their claim. The Guarantee of performance also only applies to their 50Mbps and 100Mbps packages as it would be practically very hard to support such a claim for 940Mbps.

Residents of York can select the packages by visiting this page, although despite being more of a ‘Register Your Interest‘ job we do know that customers are in fact still being connected to the service; assuming you’re covered of course (check here to find out).

The original aspiration of the Joint Venture (JV) between Sky, TalkTalk and Cityfibre was that all of York (roughly 80,000 premises) should eventually be covered and then two more cities would follow, but the future beyond the City’s first 20,000 premises is unclear.

NOTE: The new prices appear to have gone live in June, although the change wasn’t widely announced and so we only spotted it during a routine check.