First Trial Users Live on Sky and TalkTalk’s 940Mbps Broadband in York

As expected TalkTalk has confirmed that the first trial customers are now live on their joint 940Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) broadband network in the city of York, which is being built alongside Sky Broadband and Cityfibre. An early 2016 commercial launch has also been set.

Apparently “hundreds of residents and small businesses” will take part in the trial and once complete the new Ultra Fibre Optic (UFO) network is expected to become commercially available to everybody in the covered areas from January 2016.

Presently most of the Phase One roll-out, which is supported by an investment of £5m from each ISP and aims to cover 20,000 premises (i.e. further investment will be required to do the other 60,000), has been focused upon the northern half of the city.

However TalkTalk states that they’ve so far only passed 1,800 homes within the Rawcliffe, Clifton, Huntington and the Groves areas. At this rate the ISPs grand aspiration to reach 10 million UK premises with a similar fibre optic network seem like a long way away, although the York deployment is still very much an experimental / learning one.

Dido Harding, TalkTalk CEO, said:

“Ultra Fibre Optic will truly transform the broadband experience in York and we’ve been blown away by the local support. For such a leap in performance you’d expect to pay more, but we believe ultrafast broadband should be available to everyone.”

Derek Paterson, A Trial Customer from Ings View, said:

“I’m really excited to be part of this programme. Like most households, we’re doing more and more online. It’s not just the speed that’s appealing, knowing that we can all do as much as we want online at the same time is also a huge advantage.”

Both Sky Broadband and TalkTalk have already revealed their packages and prices for the service, which you can view here and here respectively. At present TalkTalk are the only ones claiming to offer the 940Mbps service at “no extra cost” above the price of their entry-level unlimited SimplyBroadband bundle, although in actual fact the ultrafast service currently costs a few pounds less (£21.70 per month all-in vs £25.20 on SimplyBroadband [line rental charge included]).

Mind you most of York is already well covered by a significant amount of Virgin Media (cable) and BTOpenreach’s (FTTC) admittedly somewhat slower hybrid-fibre superfast broadband services. But Sky and TalkTalk are likely to focus on migrating their existing subscribers and who among those wouldn’t want a 940Mbps capable service, especially if it’s the same price or lower than you already pay for standard broadband.

Never the less the big question still remains, can this network be deployed cheaply enough in order to turn it into a truly viable proposition for other UK cities? The actual roll-out costs so far have been in a similar ballpark to BT’s FTTC network (£500 per premises passed), which is good, but that doesn’t yet include the cost of connecting the final drop to individual homes and businesses (that part can add costly complications).

At the same time there have recently been a few small problems with bad street works, which required repairs (here) and that would normally add to the cost model. But strangely the council seems to be the one conducting the fix and not Cityfibre.