Vodafone Reveal UK Prices for 1Gbps FTTH Home Broadband UPDATE

ISP Vodafone has today revealed how much UK consumers will need to pay in order to access their new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) based “Gigafast Broadband” network, which is initially being rolled out to cover 1 million homes in up to 12 of Cityfibre’s existing cities by the end of 2021.

The £500m Phase One roll-out (details) has already confirmed that Milton Keynes – at a cost of around £40m – will be the first to benefit (here) and some trial homes went live in July 2018 (here). Since then several additional cities have also been confirmed including: Aberdeen, Peterborough, Edinburgh, Coventry, Huddersfield and Stirling (together accounting for about 500,000 premises and £315m of the planned investment).

If all goes well then Vodafone have indicated that there’s the “potential to extend” this FTTH deployment to reach up to 5 million homes by 2025 (approximately 50 towns and cities, representing 20% of the current UK broadband market), although this would require significantly more investment to be raised.

The construction phase has already started in several of the aforementioned cities and Vodafone are currently aiming to connect their first non-trial customers before the end of 2018. As part of that plan they’ve today finally revealed the first pricing (inc. VAT) for their new ultrafast broadband packages, which will initially only be available to pre-order from Friday 14th September 2018 in Milton Keynes.

The first official installations will then commence on 8th October 2018 and as usual a discount of £5 per month is available to customers that already have a Vodafone mobile contract.

Following the earlier pilot scheme, Gigafast Broadband will initially be available in Milton Keynes to more than 3,700 eligible homes. Almost every home in the city is expected to have access by 2020. Aberdeen and Peterborough will follow later this year, with Coventry, Edinburgh, Huddersfield and Stirling coming online in early 2019.

Nick Jeffery, Vodafone UK Chief Executive, said:

“Starting in Milton Keynes, we are helping people break free from the shackles of their old, copper-based broadband. With Gigafast Broadband, Vodafone is investing in best-in-class infrastructure for the UK, equipping the nation for the future.”

We are currently trying to seek some clarification on what type of “phone line” service is being included, since we suspect it would be VoIP but you don’t usually use the word “line” for that type of over-the-top product. Likewise there’s no information on call charges etc.

Similarly we are also trying to get more details on the new router, although Vodafone said it is a 802.11ac supporting device that features 7 antennae with beamforming, 4 x Gigabit Ethernet ports for wired connections, 2 USB ports and works as a “hub for customers’ home phone“. “Despite all of this, it is sleek and minimalist with no ugly, protruding, easy-to-break antennae,” said the operator.

For the sake of comparison, TalkTalk’s default 900Mbps package in the city of York (also built by Cityfibre) costs just £23.50 per month on a 18 month term with unlimited usage and no set-up fee. Meanwhile BT’s top ULTRAFAST FIBRE (G.fast or FTTP) package charges £59.99 a month (plus £59.99 one-off setup) for 300Mbps (49Mbps upload), although you do get a lot of extras.

Meanwhile Hyperoptic’s top 900Mbps tier costs £49 per month for 12 months (£63 thereafter) with free installation and Gigaclear charges £76.60, although the latter does have a larger setup fee of £229.99. As expected Vodafone are positioning their product to be both faster and more competitively priced than many of their key rivals.

However the aggressive pricing being set by TalkTalk may be hard for anybody to beat, even Vodafone. TalkTalk’s service seems positioned to be a loss leader in order to attract as many subscribers from slower rivals or on their own network as possible, which makes sense but such a level will make it harder for them to secure a good return on their investment. Not that it matters since at present they only exist in York.

One of Vodafone’s biggest challenges here will be in building scale by attracting enough customers to make it all worthwhile, although admittedly Cityfibre seems to be the one stomaching the main cost of deployment. Aggressive pricing is a key part of that initial approach but we still think they may need to acquire a rival to help boost their position.

Sadly it’s just a case of bad timing that they’ve announced this on the very same day as being criticised by the ASA for adverts for their broadband speed guarantee on older / unrelated services (here).

UPDATE 10:14am

Separately we should point out that Vodafone’s standard FTTC based mass market superfast broadband packages have today dropped in price to £20 for 35Mbps (average download speed) and £25 for 63Mbps. This rises to £22 and £27 respectively for new non-Vodafone mobile customers.

UPDATE 12:13pm

We’ve confirmed that the voice technology is VoIP (i.e. a SIP client running in the router) and that Vodafone’s related voice pricing is similar to their existing Home Phone service (pay per call), with competitive packages such as:

– Anytime Landline and Mobile Calls: £8 per month

– Evening and weekend calls: £4 per month

UPDATE 12:19pm

We’ve also managed to get a more detailed specification sheet and some high-res pictures of the new Gigafast Broadband Router, which is based on Broadcom’s BCM63138 chipset. This is particularly interesting since the BCM63138 also supports G.fast, as well as ADSL and VDSL2 (35b).

We can thus see Vodafone using this if they plan to launch some additional packages via Openreach’s G.fast network in the future. The chipset also packs a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor and Broadcom suggests that the USB ports may support 3G/4G mobile dongles.

Gigafast Broadband Router Specification

Dimensions:
275 x 170 x 70 mm

Colours:
Vodafone brand Grey

Chipset:
BCM63138

Ports:
1 x ADSL/VDSL/g.fast (RJ-11)
4 x Gigabit Ethernet LAN (RJ45)
1 x Gigabit Ethernet WAN (RJ45)
2 x FXS for analogue phones, fax, pos (RJ11)
2 x USB 2.0

Wi-Fi:
WiFi 11ac: 5GHz 4×4 / 11n: 2,4GHz 3×3 dual band concurrent with MIMO and beam forming
2.4 GHz: BCM4360.2, 3×3
5 GHz: BCM4366e, 4×4

Memory:
256 MB NAND Flash / 512 MB DDR3

Networks:
Fibre GPON (via GE WAN port) ; ADSL2+ / VDSL2 (35b) / g.fast (+8dBm)

Features:
SIP voice for analogue phones

We’ve asked for details of the peak WiFi speed, although by the looks of these specs it should probably achieve 2Gbps or more in ideal circumstances (real-world speeds are always considerably slower).