ISP Sky Broadband Abandons Derbyshire UK FTTH Broadband Trial

Customers of Sky Broadband’s early 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) deployment in Swandicote (Derbyshire) have this month been informed that the trial is due to end on 1st November 2018. Sadly the ISP said that they have “no plans to offer this service on a long-term basis.”

The trial deployment was first discovered in 2015 after a team of Sky’s (Easynet) engineers were spotted building new telegraph poles and fibre optic cable ducting around the civil parish village of Woodville, Midway and the Swadlincote areas of Derbyshire in England (here). At the time it was estimated that roughly 5,000 local homes could benefit (this would have cost a fair bit to roll-out – guessing c.£2m).

The development was similar to Sky’s earlier 2014 trial of a 950Mbps (Megabits per second) capable FTTH/P network around the town of Basingstoke in Hampshire (here). Crucially both of the Derbyshire and Hampshire builds are entirely separate from Sky’s more recent ‘Ultra Fibre Optic’ joint venture with TalkTalk and Cityfibre in the city of York (currently Sky remain an active wholesale partner on that deployment).

Apparently the Swadlincote area was originally selected because Sky believed that local residents were interested in ultrafast broadband and because it offered a representative cross section of the terrains / conditions that could be found elsewhere in the UK.

However the operator never revealed any findings from their earlier 2014/15 trials and in 2016 Sky’s CEO confirmed that they had no plans to build further FTTH/P networks in the UK (here). In that sense the writing was already on the wall and it was perhaps just a matter of time until they made the decision to end it.

We’ve pasted a copy of the letter below (sorry for the quality). This was kindly sent to ISPreview.co.uk by one of the affected customers (Chris), who said: “I can’t understand why sky will not offer a product on it, as it’s worked flawlessly for the trial period.” Our article continues below.

The timing of this development is particularly interesting because it follows a little over one month after Sky Broadband largely confirmed that they were going to launch a new range of “ultrafast broadband” packages, which would be based off Openreach’s G.fast and FTTP network instead of building their own (here).

More importantly it also comes hot on the heels of Comcast’s successful £30bn move to take control of Sky plc (here). The US cable giant is heavily broadband centric and if any owner was going to take a different approach in the future then it’s them.

At this stage the Comcast deal is still being finalised and during such a transition there’s usually a period of pause, where no major decisions are taken (i.e. allowing the new owner time to choose a new strategy). So we can speculate that either today’s decision was taken long before any deal was agreed (the trial was originally only supposed to run for 6 months) or Comcast has given an unofficial nod to it, which might suggest that they’re happy to stick with the Openreach model.

We have requested a comment from Sky and are awaiting their response.