Are The Changes to Sky Broadband Mid Really Very Fair?
Judging by some of the comments on the forums, we believe people are not happy.
Historically, in fact, since day 1 Sky Broadband Mid has offered it's customer's,
- A 40GB Usage Cap
- Up to 8Mb download speeds
- Up to 400Kb upload speeds
However, Sky are implementing some changes to the newer Sky Everyday Broadband package, which is of course replacing Sky Broadband Mid. These changes were leaked to us and we have since had confirmation that these new limits are in fact going to happen as from 1st August 2009
The new Sky Everyday Broadband Package contains the following features,
- A 10GB Usage Cap
- Up to 10Mb download speeds
- Up to 600 Kb upload speeds
Unfortunately, Sky have stated that the average usage of the old Mid for the majority of it's customers that took this, was less than 10GB and so they have taken steps to reduce this and package it as an improvement to the newly created Everyday package. Now I don't know who was responsible for these changes, but surely, it would have been a lot more attractive to existing Mid customers, as well as potential new Everyday customers, to have just changed the download and upload speeds. Thereby keeping the old 40GB usage cap, after all if the majority of Mid customers downloaded less than 10GB Sky would have nothing to worry about.
Sky have also taken the step of informing people via a letter shoved into the latest July edition of the Sky Magazine, as well as informing people that their monthly Sky TV subscription would in fact be going up as from 1st September. This I find rather strange, as tbh this is the first time I have ever opened my Sky Magazine, (it normally gets binned) and purely because I was expecting these changes in this edition, as we had been told previously.
The new 'Sky Broadband now even better - All for the same low price' leaflet clearly states,
"If you're a Sky Broadband Mid customer (soon to be Sky Broadband Everyday), you could enjoy faster speeds as the maximum download speed is increasing from up to 8Mb to 10Mb (speeds depend on your location and line quality).
To bring the usage in line with what the majority of customers actually use, the monthly allowance is changing to 10GB from 1st August 2009. Because we have made this change to your service, you may cancel your broadband without charge as long as you do so before this date. Details on how to do this are set out in your terms and conditions available at Sky Broadband- Making your Sky Broadband and Talk services even better where you can also find our current Usage Policies".
Without stating the obvious, if you currently get less than 8Mb as a download speed, it is highly unlikely that you would actually benefit from any increase up to 10Mb as the speed is determined by your line length or quality. It is possible, that if you improved your internal connection, or even tried your master socket, that you could increase the speed slightly, although this is not a 100% guarantee.
As for the faster upload speeds, yes, you should benefit from that if you worked on say, websites, or were to be uploading data often. However, if you just use your broadband for everyday usage and browsing, I would actually question the validity of that so called improvement.
So it leaves you with the new added disadvantage of actually losing a huge 30Gb download allowance, which in the present day, of iPlayer, YouTube, Gaming, Consoles, and more than one PC in the household I personally think this a huge mistake, that could backfire in the most spectacular way towards Sky.
We have emailed Sky to ask if it was at all possible, to actually speak to someone, regarding the changes, unfortunately Sky have chosen to ignore it, and not even replied, after over a week.
You can take part in our forum thread here, or even vote in the current poll, and we welcome constructive criticism, you never know Sky may actually relent on the biggest grudge at the moment, the loss of 30Gb usage.