Sky to launch 40 Mbps fibre service for £20 a month

Sky has issued its Q2 11/12 financial results which indicate a strong performance with profit up 16% when revenue increased by just 6%. This increased profit comes on the back of a continuing growth in customers with the average customer now taking 2.6 products from Sky, compared to 2 back in 2009.

In the broadband sector the largest piece of news to emerge is the anticipated launch of Sky Fibre initially offering an up to 40 Mbps (2 Mbps upload) for £20 a month from April 2012, and the product crucially will remain unlimited. The service is based around the Openreach FTTC service, which is expected to cover 30% of the UK by April. Their standard ADSL2+ unlimited product is £10 a month, though by bundling with Sky TV its price reduces to £7.50 a month. The fibre service will carry a £50 activation fee (this covers the Openreach engineer visit) and will only be available if you have Sky TV.

The Sky LLU network is continuing expand with the plan that by June 2013 coverage will be 88% of UK households, currently Sky has some 1,907 unbundled exchanges. The firm had 3,651,000 broadband customers at the end of December 2011, a rise of some 645,000 in 12 months, and 166,000 compared to the previous quarter. Some 2,146,000 broadband customers were fully unbundled (phone and broadband running off Sky hardware in the exchange), another 1,257,000 using shared LLU (phone on BT kit, broadband on Sky hardware), the remaining 248,000 were still using the BT Wholesale broadband platform in the parts of the UK where Sky has no LLU presence.

The reach of Sky will soon extend into Wi-Fi hotspots once it launches its public Wi-Fi service powered by The Cloud, which will give customers access to some 10,000 hotspots. The Sky Go service is expanding adding more channels, and will also be coming to the Android platform, the service attracted 1.5 million unique users in December 2011, with 2.5 million customers using it since its launch.

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