ISP Uno Pilot UK 160Mbps and 330Mbps Gfast Broadband Service
Internet provider uno (uno Comms Ltd) has today become the next UK ISP after BT to pilot a new range of “ultrafast broadband” packages based off the fledgling hybrid fibre G.fast network, which can offer download speeds of up to 160Mbps (30Mbps up) and 330Mbps (50Mbps up).
At present Openreach are only just starting to deploy the new G.fast technology, which should reach over 1 million UK homes and businesses within the next few months before extending to a total of 10 million premises by the end of 2020. The deployment is still technically in the pilot phase and as such uno’s packages have similarly been classed as a pilot (they could change in the future).
The packages all come attached to a 12 month contract term, as well as 1000GB of monthly data usage with unmetered off-peak use between 8pm – 8am (a 24/7 unmetered package is being considered), static IP address, plus 250MB of shared email and webspace (inc. hosting for one real domain name). The prices exclude VAT (20%) and line rental, although you can add phone line rental from £9.99 per month.
Gfast 160/30 Pilot
Price: £34.95 +vat per monthGfast 330/50 Pilot
Price: £39.99 +vat per month
We should point out that the service also attracts a one-off activation fee of £97.00 +vat, which includes an engineer installation and Openreach’s own G.fast modem (Huawei MT992). In other words, you’ll probably still need a separate third-party router to help handle your wireless network etc.
As a quick comparison, if we include line rental and VAT into the price of the 330Mbps tier then that pushes the monthly rental to £59.99, which is the same as BT’s ULTRAFAST 2 (up to 314Mbps). The BT service of course benefits from some premium extras (BT Wi-Fi hotspots, unlimited UK weekend calls and included Smart Hub X router, gift cards etc.) and cheaper setup at £59.99. On the other hand uno is much more highly rated.
One drawback to uno’s service is that you can’t order it online without a copper line based phone number (the checker only uses phone numbers), which means hard luck for those who don’t yet have a line installed (e.g. house movers).
G.fast is in its infancy and we expect many more ISPs to launch packages over the next few months.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Also those of us on VM can’t use their checker either.
Use full address checker instead on dsl checker
the dsl address checker won’t help me order UNO service that relies on an OR provisioned phone line to validate.
I’ve had a GFast connection from another alt net provider for over a month now.
Maybe the headline needs revising?
G.fast is still officially in the pilot phase (Openreach have not said otherwise) and uno told us directly their packages are pilots. So far only Cerberus Networks, BT and uno have put packages online for the general public but the technology is still in pilot, while a few others only have closed trials. I don’t see how this would change the title?
I wish we’d catchup…. Sofia, Bulgaria has 1gbps. My house in UK gets 0.25mbps….
I use EE 4GEE to get 70mbps. But I’m capped at 50gb pcm….
@Simon
Only 0.7% of U.K. premises are limited to download speeds of 2Mbps or less, interesting to see the equivalent stats for Bulgaria. You could of course get faster speeds for your UK property, however you may have to contribute towards the cost.
In the meantime, what’s stopping you upgrading your EE SIM to the 200GB per month package announced last week. £60/month seems pretty good value to me.
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/scoreboard/bulgaria
“Bulgaria belongs to the low performing cluster of countries”
Vs
“The United Kingdom belongs to the high performing cluster of countries”
Sofia is the capital city of Bulgaria. 1Gb is available in apartment buildings there. Do you live in an apartment building in our capital or another of our major cities?
If not this is like comparing a UK village with Paris and complaining the village doesn’t have a metro or with Tokyo and bemoaning the lack of high speed rail.
Fingers crossed they will get around to actually switching these on in all the pilot areas. None of the Hunslet exchange appears ready yet pods have been installed since August.
I stand corrected. A few cabinets are ready now but over half of those I checked at random were not active, and were all installed in August and September.
Very strange way to go: installing infrastructure, complete with power and backhaul, and not completing commissioning. Wonder what’s up?
@Carl
Something to do with the backhaul not being in place?
There’s definitely capacity to the exchange, however there might be some CableLinks missing.
Unfortunately I’m not sure if the pods use the same L2S as their parent DSLAM and actually doubt it so I have no way of checking.
If they do I’ll see if I can find correlations there. They were built across quite different phases and not sure how Openreach fill the ports.
Actually, given I can’t use it anyway and won’t be, never mind. 😀
Yes my brother lives in the Hunslet area and I saw the extension pods installed months ago but still not gone live yet.
Very unusual way of doing a pilot with most of the areas not even been live, surely the whole point in a pilot is to get as many end users using the service as possible?
Looks like G.FAST will still be a long way off any national roll out yet. Considering getting an extra line installed and using MWAN3 on my router to load balance the two connections as any downloading I do uses multiple connections anyway so it would benefit from it.
Lets hope they give service to people and not use an out of data database to lose business!
Like with FTTC currently