Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
In a major shift for one of the UK market’s largest retail ISPs, Sky Broadband has quietly begun introducing a new, albeit not currently cheaper, range of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based home broadband packages that harness CityFibre’s alternative national network. Previously, Sky only sold packages via Openreach’s network.
The agreement with CityFibre was first officially revealed in August 2024 (here), although it’s taken Sky this long to introduce the new packages because they’ve had to get all of their systems, support and services ready to cater for the added complexity of selling to millions of customers via two different networks.
In theory, Sky should benefit from the deal by virtue of the fact that they’ll be able to launch faster (symmetric speed) and more competitively priced full fibre broadband packages into areas currently covered by CityFibre’s network (these will be given preference in areas of overbuild with Openreach).
On the flip side, CityFibre should benefit by virtue of gaining access to another of the market’s largest retail broadband providers (they already work with TalkTalk, Vodafone, Zen Internet and others), which has the potential to significantly increase take-up (over time) on their new network – boosting the business case for future investment.
At the time of writing, Sky has not yet put out an official announcement, thus the above development was spotted this week during ISPreview’s routine ISP listings update and then confirmed by several other members of our community who had run checks on their own areas. In short, if you live in a CityFibre area, then you’ll now see their packages instead of Openreach’s (i.e. it’s available to new customers, but we’re not yet sure about re-contracting users, which will need another engineer visit to fit the new fibre + ONT modem).
However, the main benefit from this for consumers currently seems to be in terms of CityFibre’s superior upload speeds (symmetric), since at present Sky appears to be using identical pricing to their Openreach tiers and has also not launched any faster packages than 1Gbps (we do expect faster packages to follow).
CityFibre’s packages are usually cheaper than Openreach’s at wholesale, which should save Sky some money, albeit at the cost of being less competitive with other ISPs on the same network. On the other hand, Sky’s existing pricing is already fairly attractive, so this may not be such a big concern.
One other consideration is that, at the time of writing, Sky does not appear to be listing a new router and so it currently looks as if the Sky Max Hub is still their primary device of choice for the new service too (awaiting confirmation of this). But they will need something better when they start pushing into future multi-Gigabit plans.
The move may worry Openreach, which has previously worked hard to keep Sky Broadband on their side (the earlier Equinox discounts on FTTP may have played a role in that effort). The operator now risks losing even more market share to alternative networks and at an increasingly rapid pace.
However, the growing competition could also make it easier for the BT Group to argue with Ofcom that Openreach should be allowed to respond with greater FTTP discounts or softer regulation, which may become a factor in the current Telecoms Market Review (TAR) process.
UPDATE 8:50am
Take note that Sky hasn’t yet made their CityFibre plans available via comparison sites, thus you’ll need to go directly to their website, otherwise only the Openreach results may show.