Sky strikes an ultrafast deal with Openreach

Sky UK has reportedly become the first customer of a new discount deal from Openreach to encourage use of Gfast technology.

According to the Telegraph, fixed line wholesaler Openreach has been offering discounts of up to 40% to entice ISPs to use its Gfast products. Gfast extracts more bandwidth from legacy copper infrastructure, of which Openreach has loads, and is therefore a lot cheaper to provide that fresh fibre.

In typical ISP over-marketing style, this Gfast service is being packaged as ‘ultrafast’, which is one order of magnitude faster than superfast. It’s not obvious where we go from there. Megafast? F*ckingfast? Sky is apparently also signing up for fibre, where it’s available, which will be marketed as OMFGfast.

The Telegraph piece indicates UK ISPs are conflicted about even offering faster broadband to their customers as slower service apparently provide more margin, which is depressing. Ofcom has been hassling Openreach to cut its process but if current prices still disincentives ISPs from trying to improve their offering then it looks like the UK broadband market is still somewhat dysfunctional.

Here’s a recent Openreach video about how great Gfast is.