Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
A couple of weeks have passed since Sky Broadband became the largest retail ISP to go live on CityFibre’s national Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network (here). But some rival providers have privately begun to note that customers who sign-up to Sky’s service seem to be getting earlier installation dates than they can. We take a closer look.
According to CityFibre’s website (here), customers who take one of their consumer full fibre broadband products via a supporting ISP should get a fairly short “6 day standard install lead time“, although other ISPs have expressed that the “service will be provided in approximately 10 working days” or sometimes up to 14. Experiences will of course vary by location and type of install (new provision vs migration etc.).
However, in theory, all ISPs should be pulling their dates from the same appointment book, which would mean that – no matter which ISP you choose on CityFibre’s network – somebody with the same address and provision type should expect to get either an identical installation date, or at least something very close to that. But ISPreview has observed something different.
Over the past week a number of network engineers, consumers and ISP reps have privately suggested that Sky Broadband appeared as if they could be getting preferential treatment for installations on CityFibre’s network. The feedback indicated that Sky’s customers were often able to pick installation dates (during the order process) that were up to 2-3 weeks in advance of anybody else – checked across multiple cities.
In response, ISPreview decided to conduct a few anecdotal tests via several ISPs, using a random selection of addresses covered by CityFibre in York, Poole, and Dundee. We only tested against new provisions (not migrations) and also excluded any possibility that the results could be polluted by the order process picking up different networks, such as Openreach. We also repeat-tested via different web browsers to avoid cache conflicts and to confirm our findings.
The Results
Address in Dundee:
The earliest installation date offered by Sky was “Tuesday 5th August (AM slot)“, while every other ISP we tested (e.g. TalkTalk, FibreCast, Zen Internet and several random picks) returned an earliest date of Monday 18th August (almost a two week gap).
Address in York:
The earliest installation date offered by Sky was “Monday 28th July (PM slot)“, while every other ISP we tested returned dates between 31st July (Zen) and out as far as 6th August (TalkTalk).
Address in Poole:
The earliest installation date offered by Sky was “Monday 28th July (AM slot)“, while most of the other ISPs we tested returned dates for Monday 4th August.
The limited testing we conducted showed that Sky Broadband always came out with the earliest date, while every other ISP tended to get a date that was anything from a few short days to several weeks further into the future. The results seemed to support the initial feedback we’d received, although only one of the examples tested highlighted a c.2-week gap. But we suspect that we might well have found longer gaps by testing against a larger sample.
ISPreview queried this trend with both Sky and CityFibre, although Sky did not respond to our follow-up queries and instead directed us back to the network operator’s statement below.
A CityFibre spokesperson told ISPreview:
“CityFibre offers the same market-leading products and services to all of our customers and we always aim to offer an installation date within days of an order being placed. Whilst there will be variances in the first available date, informed by demand, customer equipment availability, or the complexity of the planned install, the vast majority (around 90%) of our offered install dates are within ten working days, with around half offered within five working days.”
Once again, the issue isn’t so much with how long it takes to install, but rather the fact that one ISP – Sky – seems able to give out earlier dates than all of the other ISPs we tested, including those where issues of demand and CPE availability should not be preventing access to the same dates.
The other possibility here is that Sky could be doing something unusual with their ordering system and not treating or checking CityFibre’s appointments database in the same way as others. But if that were the case then we’d expect the selected appointment date, assuming users only picked the earliest one, to end up being delayed after completion of the order (we couldn’t test this for obvious reasons).
One key thing to point out here is that the date customers choose should really be expressed as “provisional“. But of all the ISPs we tested, only TalkTalk actually clearly expressed it that way – none of the other order systems we tried referred to the selected dates as provisional or subject to change, even though they’re not strictly set in stone until AFTER the order has been placed.