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A newspaper report has claimed that UK ISP Sky Broadband (Comcast) could have “tens of thousands” of customers on CityFibre’s alternative Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network as soon as May 2025. But the “full scale” roll-out is allegedly not expected to be completed until just a little later (H2 2025), and packages have yet to go live.
In case anybody has forgotten. Sky (Sky Broadband) currently only sells broadband packages via Openreach’s national network, which covers around 18 million UK premises for FTTP (many more if we factor FTTC/SOGEA). But this is due to change after last year’s announcement that CityFibre – an alternative FTTP network that covers 4.4m premises (4.2m RFS) – had signed a “long-term partnership” (wholesale) agreement with Sky (here).
The deal to secure support from one of the country’s largest three retail broadband providers is seen as being key in helping CityFibre to secure additional funding of around £1.5bn from investors (c. £500m as equity and £1bn as debt), which is something we’ve covered before (here). CityFibre already works with big names like Vodafone, TalkTalk, Zen Internet and tens of other ISPs.
Sky Broadband’s customers should also benefit from gaining access to faster (symmetric) speeds and at lower prices in CityFibre areas, although Sky has yet to formally launch their products and prices. Nevertheless, the latest FT (paywall) report indicates that the commercial launch is getting very close, and our own industry sources suggest the same.
Officially, neither CityFibre nor Sky are ready to say anything beyond what was already said last year. But according to ISPreview’s sources, Sky Broadband is already fully enabled across CityFibre’s entire footprint and recently completed the software side development. We’ve also seen evidence of some staff trials, which appear to have recently completed.
Sky’s next task will be to test live customer journeys, which is where the FT’s mention of “tens of thousands” of customers probably comes from (it’ll be in the low tens of thousands). Sources suggest the process could start this month and continue into May, beginning with new provisions and moving into migrations (e.g. re-contracting users). But bulk migrations of users on existing Openreach lines is unlikely due to the need for an engineer visit to install new ONTs (optical modems) inside homes.
In theory this means that Sky Broadband could be ready to launch their first CityFibre based broadband packages by around June 2025. This is also roughly when we expect the network operator to complete its upgrade to 10Gbps capable XGS-PON full fibre technology (here). Good timing.
Sky are no doubt planning to officially launch all of this in the near future, although it’s not yet known if that will initially be a soft-launch or a live product launch on the same day. Either way, we’re looking forward to seeing how they’ll price their packages, what router they’ll bundle (it may need something better than the ‘Sky Max Hub‘ – pictured) and whether they do anything a bit different from other providers on the same network.
CityFibre currently still aspires to cover up to 8 million UK premises with their new full fibre network – representing c.30% of the UK. But their original target of hitting that by around 2025 will not be achieved, and the operator has instead indicated a desire to boost their growth via M&A (mergers and acquisition) of smaller alternative networks (here). They also hold ten state-aid funded Project Gigabit contracts, worth nearly £1bn.