EE UK Says No TV for 1.6Gbps Broadband Users Until Later in 2024
New customers and those migrating from BT, who may be looking to upgrade to broadband ISP EE’s top 1.6Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) plans, may sadly have to keep waiting until later this year. But only if they also intend on bundling it in with the provider’s Pay TV products.
In case anybody has forgotten, EE became the first UK ISP to launch (here) a package based off Openreach’s new 1.8Gbps FTTP tier last year (advertised at an average speed of 1.6Gbps). The move was part of BT’s effort to turn EE into their “flagship brand” for consumer customers, which has so far also meant that existing customers of BT’s own service remain limited to a top speed of c.900Mbps.
The introduction of EE’s new package initially came with some caveats when it was first launched and thus felt a bit more like a beta product, which was quite apt given that Openreach’s underlying products were also still in testing at the time and that only changed on 1st April 2024 (here and here). One of those early caveats was the fact that EE couldn’t bundle their pay TV product with the 1.6Gbps package.
The issue recently came to the fore again after some of ISPreview’s BT using readers contacted us to complain that they still couldn’t switch their broadband and TV bundle to EE’s top 1.6Gbps package. ISPreview queried this with EE and the provider confirmed that EE TV is currently only available with their Full Fibre plans up to download speeds of 900Mbps.
The provider did confirm that they do aim to introduce 1.6Gbps plans with EE TV, but sadly not until later this year sometime. Quite why this is proving to be such a problem remains unclear, particularly since EE’s TV box only needs a fraction of the 1.6Gbps package’s top speed to function at its best. But it could possibly be related to their plans for a new Wi-Fi 7 capable router, which is also due to launch later in 2024 (here).
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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As an existing customer on 900Mbit I can’t even upgrade to an option with TV without getting a message saying “please call”. I also have no option of upgrading to a faster service.
I suspect any issue is purely their back end ordering system.
Literally makes no sense, surely this is just an IPTV box and you’d imagine the channels you get are behind a login paywall. How is that limited by the choice of bearer or ONT?
EE presumably aren’t “broadcasting” their TV service on whatever system/network this faster service uses yet. You don’t need to log in to anything on the TV box, in my experience of BT TV at least, it pulls all that information through itself.
Similarly when I switched from BT to Hyperoptic, my Humax BT TV Youview box lost all its internet-based channels as well as the BT branding on the interface, and effectively turned into a standard box.
It’s nothing to do with the router. The 1.6Gbps package is built on a different stack to the others, direct from OR and not via BTW for one example
I assume this is due to BT/EE TV using Mulicast to provide a lot of the channels which must mean that the 1.6Gbps service is not using the usual EE ports.
There is also a quirk that BT customers cannot move to EE broadband if they have previously had TNT sport on Sky
Difficult to imagine BT Consumer installed their own kit in over a thousand exchanges in a matter of weeks after avoiding going around BTW for a couple of decades due to politics to sell 1.6 Gb to a very few on an Openreach trial.
More likely BTW thought selling multicast on this ‘trial’ was extracting the urine a bit: can’t just multicast on BTW have to pay for it.
BT Networks have been throwing 100Gb links in like the wind for ages largely to support BT Business’s wholesale offerings.
Consumer wanted to avoid BTW and go direct to OR. Marc, Nick and Nathalie have been talking about it for the last couple of years. The other sub 1.6Gbps tiers will move across in due course too.
Heh. Business are in a fair amount of trouble if that’s happening. That’s the vast majority of their customer base gone.
A couple of 1.6 customers I’ve spoken to are both connected to the same Business MSE they were on BT Consumer: both moved from there to EE.
Any idea what’s up?
I also happen to have access to a 1.6 EE line and I can confirm it behaves in the same way as any other. PPP hostname is the same, can bring up a connection with the BT Wholesale PPP test user, Nokia MAC address on packets received from the network, etc. So it’s either actually just using the same Wholesale platform or it’s a 100% flawless emulation of it built with the same equipment?
Can’t view the unencrypted TV streams using VLC however – so there is some sort of technical issue. I wonder if the ONT isn’t passing it through
I was also skeptical of the idea that BT would be spending a collossal amount of money replacing a network they already own and operate! It doesn’t make sense in the way it does for other ISPs.
I’ve drawn a blank. Whomever Anonymous is they seem to claim knowledge of thinking at the top of Consumer but I can find no evidence of network build and looks like name dropping.
Something like that being advanced enough that customers were being connected would’ve been announced to shareholders and Consumer would’ve been hiring people like crazy.
Fairly confident of the identity of this particular Anonymous and writing this off accordingly.
On the lack of TV the ONT doesn’t care about multicast so best educated guess is Business’s trial of 1.8G doesn’t include multicast: that’s a separate addon.
Once it’s properly productised however Business are doing so, new system or whatever, it should support multicast.
Not surprised… Their ordering system is a mess… Their FTTP is solid… But don’t even think about ordering things like game pass on top of it. It’s all a big mess to get it going and then cancelled again.
It’s the same with EE Digital Home Phone, the EE equivalent of BT Digital Voice.
Existing BT Full Fibre broadband users can swap as already mentioned in the article from BT 900 to EE Gigabit equivalent and still get TV and VoIP.
Whereas, with the 1.6gb package, you’ll lose not just TV but BT Digital Voice as well, just like the TV, you can’t get EE Digital Home Phone on it until at least the Summer.
So, expect EE TV and EE Digital Home Phone to be made available towards end of Summer 2024, or earlier if possible.
All around the same time they release the new Wifi7 BT/EE Hub to the public and out of trials.
What’s the betting that it gets released all together as a new package, instead of those who were promised it on switchover only to find they couldn’t have it getting it…