Sky Broadband has long been one of the quickest and best fibre broadband services in the UK, with fast, stable connections at surprisingly affordable rates. Whether you’re a gamer, a streamer or casual user – or whether you have a whole household full of power users – there’s a Sky Broadband package for you.
Lately though, not surprisingly, Sky Broadband has been more focused than ever on pure speed. As 4K video and gaming becomes the norm, and web use is not so much a pastime as an essential part of daily life for most of the population, ultra-fast broadband has become more of a must-have than a luxury for more and more people.
Sky Broadband’s latest and greatest offering is Gigafast. Offering insane speeds of 900Mb/s, – that’s 25x faster than Sky’s standard fibre service – it’s future-proof connectivity for the modern home. Sky promises that with Gigafast, you can connect up to 120 devices – that’s enough even for the T3 office, just about.
Gigafast joins Sky Broadband’s existing range of fast fibre packages. As it stands your options are as follows:
- Superfast 35 – average download speeds of 36 Mb/s
- Superfast – average download speeds of 59 Mb/s
- Ultrafast – average download speeds of 145 Mb/s
- Ultrafast Plus – average download speeds of 500 Mb/s
- Gigafast – average download speeds of 900 Mb/s
Packages start from just £28 with Gigafast currently available from £55 per month. Sky Broadband also offers Boost, guaranteeing those minimum speeds, plus Wi-Fi coverage in every room or your money back, for just £5 per month. Free engineer visits when needed and daily line checks are also included.
We were naturally keen to find out more about Sky Broadband and Gigafast so we called up Aman Bhatti. He’s Sky Broadband’s Director of Propositions, and a man who knows a thing or two about rapid delivery.
Aman Bhatti, Sky Broadband’s Director of Propositions and BIG data user
So Aman, who can get the most use out of Sky Broadband Gigafast?
“This product is a great option for busy, bandwidth hungry households, those where there are multiple devices all connected to and using the internet at the same time.
“With Gigafast, you can connect more than 120 devices at once, meaning you can stream in UHD from different devices, play multiplayer games direct from the cloud and, if working from home, join video calls or upload large files in seconds. As well as super rapid downloads, Gigafast has an average upload speed of 90 Mb/s!
Sky Broadband Gigafast must give gamers a big advantage.
“Because of the huge download and upload speeds, it’s a brilliant option if you are a gamer. While playing online you can wave goodbye to annoying lag, with super low latency meaning you always have the edge – even while streaming with mates or downloading the next big AAA title to get stuck into.
“As cloud gaming becomes the norm, a high bandwidth and reliable connection is key to playing the biggest and best games. We know 47% of households already use Wi-Fi for gaming alongside other day-to-day uses, so the need for Gigafast speeds is only set to grow in line with this.
Are you a gamer yourself?
“I always imagined myself to be a champion FIFA gamer, but these days I’m slightly out of practice. I’ll be encouraging my son and daughter to join me in that when the time is right. When I was a gamer, I would have loved to have been able to take advantage of a product like Gigafast to give me a competitive edge!
Sky Broadband's router: plant one in your nest
How much data does you and your family get through?
“Our usage is actually quite high. As a family of four (with two children under the age of five), we all have different uses for our home Wi-Fi: we stream, work from home and we make the most of our UHD TV. Peak time is the late afternoon, when working from home clashes with the kids getting back from nursery: the mix of playing music on our smart speaker, streaming the kids’ favourite shows, and working from home all combines to challenge our network, and we’ve used 1,500GB in the last 30 days alone.
“Our family’s data usage is almost three times that of the average household, and I can only see our data needs increasing. I have friends with teenage kids with the latest Xbox and PlayStation setups, a house full of smart home tech and a Sky Q connected to a TV that they love watching UHD movies and shows on – so they’re definitely prime candidates for a Gigafast connection!”
What kind of infrastructure goes into making broadband this fast?
“Alongside our partners, we’re delivering the rollout of Fibre to Premises across the nation. Our aim is to serve 25 million properties by the end of 2026, with 20% of homes already able to access an industry-leading FTTP connection.
“We’ve also continued to invest in the Sky Broadband network to make sure capacity is always ahead of customer demands, providing a congestion free network. This has been even more important since the move to a more flexible way of working, and it’s something we’ve worked very hard to provide.”
Other than speed, what do you think makes Sky Broadband better than the competition?
“Our customer service sets us apart from the rest. We've received the fewest complaints of any ISP in 2022 according to Ofcom and were named Choose Broadband Awards’ Best Customer Service winner in 2022. Also, our Speed Guarantee means that if your speed falls below the speed we told you you would get, then we’ll give you money back!”
Aside from Gigafast, what’s the most popular Sky Broadband package at the moment?
Needs differ from house to house so we offer a variety of services and speeds to best suit people - from smaller households to busy, connected homes. They range from Superfast 35, for homes with fewer connected devices, all the way up to Gigafast, offering full-fibre speeds of 900 Mb/s – which is 25 times faster than Superfast 35.
Each package is popular within its own right, but we’re seeing a trend towards packages which offer the biggest and best download and upload speeds, as our homes become busier and more connected.
While Gigafast may currently be for the most connected households, serving lots of devices all at once, soon that will describe most households in the UK. That’s why we see Giagfast as being the future. We know 65% of homes already use Wi-Fi to livestream and that trend is only set to continue. As 4K HDR becomes the norm, entertainment is set to take up even more bandwidth.”
Inevitably at some point, you’ll do another service that’s even faster. Are there any words left to describe it? You’ve got Ultrafast, Ultrafast Plus and now Gigafast…
I’m sure we’ll have plenty of ideas! We’re always looking to the next thing, the next way to serve our customers with even faster and more reliable connections. Gigafast Plus feels like it might be the go-to but who knows… it might be something completely new. Any suggestions?
Erm… Gigafastest?
That’s great, I’ll put it to the team.
