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).