ISP TalkTalk UK Closes “Obsolete” UFO Full Fibre Product in York

Customers on TalkTalk’s 944Mbps Ultra Fibre Optic (UFO) broadband service in the City of York, which is a full fibre (FTTP) network that was originally launched in 2015 as part of a partnership with Sky Broadband and Cityfibre (here), have been informed that the “trial” service is now “coming to an end” because its “equipment is obsolete“.

The customer notice itself states as follows (credits to Martin): “We’re getting in touch to let you know that your current Ultra Fibre Optic broadband service is coming to the end of its life. This is happening because Ultra Fibre Optic was one of the first trials of full fibre broadband in the UK, and some of the equipment is becoming obsolete and needs to be replaced.”

The announcement mentions that TalkTalk are “in the final stages of launching our latest full fibre broadband service to your area“, which will offer average download speeds of 944Mbps and bundle their latest Amazon eero Pro 6 router. This is expected to be available sometime in November 2022, but at the time of writing, the ISP has not said how much the new package will cost or provided any details about the contract terms etc.

The original package also offered speeds of 900Mbps+, albeit for the incredibly cheap price of just £21.70 per month (more recently it’s become £27 – £28.50). Suffice to say, we wouldn’t be at all surprised if TalkTalk’s replacement package costs more than that, not least because their current 944Mbps plan is £49 per month for 24-months on Openreach’s FTTP network and £36 on Cityfibre’s. Both packages also promote upload speeds of 109-112Mbps.

Furthermore, we think it’s highly likely that the provider’s engineers may also need to replace the old Optical Network Terminal (ONT) in homes.

Why the change?

In order to understand why this is happening now, it helps to understand the history of TalkTalk’s deployment in York. Over time, the original partnership between TalkTalk, Sky Broadband and Cityfibre gave way to a TalkTalk dominated project under their FibreNation brand, which expanded into more areas. But in 2020 Cityfibre purchased FibreNation from TalkTalk for £206m and reached a favourable wholesale agreement with the ISP (here).

Since then, Cityfibre has had to replace some of the old Huawei kit in York with their own (here) and, only a few months ago, they also chose York to support their first city-wide deployment of 10Gbps capable XGS-PON based full fibre technology (here).

Back in July we were informed that the successful XGS-PON pilot would enable Cityfibre to work with its ISP partners to “upgrade end-customer ONTs in phases going forward, thereby minimising any network upgrade related service experience impacts“. So, given that the old ONT kit in homes is now 7 years old and at a reasonable end-of-life, then it makes sense to conduct all this as part of a broader package change.

Admittedly, TalkTalk does now face more competition from gigabit-capable broadband networks in York, with Virgin Media covering the majority of the city and Openreach having a modest coverage. But we suspect that TalkTalk won’t be expecting to lose too many customers to their rivals during the product change, even if the new package does cost more, since it will probably still end up being a fair bit cheaper than the alternatives.