Your broadband is never fast enough. When I was on 2Mbps I craved 10. When I was on 10Mbps, I knew I needed 50. 100 became 150. And even now I'm eyeing my 500Mb connection and thinking "wouldn't it be good if...?"
If like me you need as much speed as they can pipe down your street, you'll be interested in Sky's new Gigafast broadband. With speeds of up to 900Mb/s it's 25 times faster than Sky's average broadband speed, and the average upload speed of 90Mb/s is more than enough for solid gaming and Zoom calls.
The big selling point for me isn't the speed, though. It's the connectivity. This service is designed to connect over 120 devices at once. That's really important.
Everything everywhere all of the time
Broadband used to be something you used for one or two devices: your computer and maybe your smart TV. That's changed considerably: you don't need to be massively into your tech to have some smart speakers, a smart TV, a smartwatch, a smart doorbell, one or more games consoles and who knows what else all connecting to the same router. With everything trying to connect all of the time, even a really fast broadband connection can get bogged down by all those demands.
So what Sky's offering here is twofold. First of all there's the actual broadband speed: up to 900Mb/s and guaranteed to deliver 600Mb/s or you'll get your money back. And secondly there's a router that's designed specifically to share that bandwidth in the most effective way with all your smart home stuff.
It's not the cheapest – it's £55 per month on an 18-month contract; Hyperoptic's Hyperfast offers the same speed for £40 a month over 12 months and BT's Full Fibre 900 is £49, albeit over two years – but it's fairly competitive, widely available and the money back guarantee is a nice touch. I'd expect the announcement to kick off a little price war between Sky and its rivals, so it might be a good idea to keep an eye on the best broadband deals to see how its rivals react.
If you're a Sky customer, though, or are thinking about being one, then bagging Gigafast along with a great TV package, maybe even with Sky's streaming-focussed Sky Glass 4K smart TV, will mean you've got an incredible entertainment and computing setup.
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You can sign up for Sky's Gigafast broadband service on Sky's official website.
Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).