Sky may drop the price of broadband products

[ToeKnee]

With many other ISPs now offering "unlimited" broadband packages Sky are facing some serious competition, particularly with their overpriced Fibre Pro product.

I expect they are playing a wait and see game to see how many subscribers they lose for broadband and phone.
If that number gets too big then they will drop their prices.

The price they can drop to will depend on the price they have managed to negotiate with BT Openreach.

[seawright]

If that number gets too big then forget about the "up to" in September's 10% price increase.

[Scubbie]

Sky's Unlimited Broadband product IMHO has set the goal posts for other ISPs.

Sure others offered unlimited products previously, but they didn't have the infrastructure or underestimated the costs and found that everyone was switching to their network and their bandwidth could not cope with the traffic.

Sky has stayed ahead of this most of the time. When there has been an issue with the back haul, Sky has increased the available bandwidth to carry the extra traffic rather than introduce measures to enforce a system to share the available bandwidth more fairly with others.

For far too long the other ISPs, with BT and VM at the top of this list, have advertised wonderful connection speeds only to turn around and tell the customers "but you can't download too much at that speed".

A couple of years ago it was mentioned that the average monthly traffic on each connection was around 17mb. It was also stated that this figure was rising, IIRC, at a rate where it doubled every 3 years.

I appreciate that I personally download quite a lot. I also appreciate that there are many out there who hardly use the Internet at all. However there are a growing number of people who are legitimately downloading video content to watch at home and those who find themselves on limited bandwidths are going to suffer.

So in the interests of what we, the consumers, are looking for more and more, I am really glad to see other ISPs offering proper Unlimited packages. I am even happier that these new packages are being offered at prices which are more competitive. As for what Sky will do in response, I think that we would all agree that we would love Sky to reduce their broadband prices so that they are more competitive when compared to the other products, but not at the expense of the quality of the products.

[seawright]

A couple of years ago it was mentioned that the average monthly traffic on each connection was around 17mb. It was also stated that this figure was rising, IIRC, at a rate where it doubled every 3 years.

I always thought that Sky were paying lip service with their offer of free broadband in the form of Sky Broadband Lite in that it would be nearly impossible for anyone who uses the internet on a regular basis to limit their monthly usage to 2GB. If the statisticians are to be believes then evidently I was wrong. Now who was it that said "You can prove anything with statistics."?

[Racey43]

Well spotted deadman!

http://www.skyuser.co.uk/forum/gener...tml#post414718

According to Reuters, it looks likely that Sky will drop their broadband prices:

BSkyB to cut broadband fees as it enters BT price war: paper | Reuters

.

Apparently the unnamed sources got it wrong.
However, it initiated 6 pages of discussion and gave us something to get worked about.

[deadman1984]

If they drop the fiber pro down then in retrospect they have to drop the 40/10 package down to.

[Scubbie]

Ok, so it is Wednesday. Half the week has gone for an announcement such as this.

The major results will be announced at the end of next month. I recall that in last years results Sky made a big thing over passing the 4 millionth broadband customer.

I guess that someone in the boardroom is working out the best way to tackle the price challenge from BT and when it will be a good time to launch a counter-strike.

There are also wholesale prices, back haul and servers centre costs, to worry about and I suspect that there are also issues with some other contracts too. There is also the likelihood that the prices from VM will also be restructured soon or perhaps they will also announce something significant soon.

All these will go some way to explaining why there has been no announcement yet, but I can't see that it will be prevent Sky from responding in a positive manner and hopefully reduce the prices.

[speedyrite]

And there's still 2 days left in this week for something to happen...

[Racey43]

And there's still 2 days left in this week for something to happen...

The Telegraph did say early this week.
It's just disappointing that many people, myself included, got excited about a price decrease report based on an unfounded rumour.
Impending changes to Apple products cause the the rumour-mill to work overtime too.
I'll know to "believe it when I see it" the next time.

[deadman1984]

I hope it doesn't end up being false otherwise going to be a complete waste of posts lol.