Sky Broadband cheaper for 18 months in price drop
Sky Broadband is cutting the cost of its most popular packages by an average £8.99 a month in a bid to drum up new business.
New and existing customers will pay the same prices across the board.
Each deal comes with a wireless router, Sky Yahoo email and a 12-month trial of internet security software McAfee.
Sky’s cheapest fibre broadband deal is now the Sky Fibre package, now being offered at £20 a month instead of £28.99.
For that you get average UK download speeds of 34Mbps, 25Gb of data allowance and line rental and Sky Talk included.
Buyer beware: Sky are warning that if you stream a lot of content or like watching HD films then you’ll likely hit the data cap before your month runs out.
Read more: Virgin Media shocks market with one-month broadband deals
Next up is the £30 a month Sky Fibre Unlimited deal, which gives you the same download speeds with line rental and Sky Talk included, but takes off the data limit so you can stream with impunity.
Sky say upload speeds for Sky Fibre and Fibre Unlimited will sit at an average of 9.5Mbps.
Sky Fibre Max is the bells-and-whistles broadband deal at £35 a month, down from £43.99.
The average UK download speed for Sky Fibre Max is bumped up to 60Mbps up to a maximum of 78Mbps.
Upload speeds should hit an average of 19Mbps.
All of these Sky Broadband deals are available with or without Sky TV.
Set up charges will apply: Sky Fibre on its own comes with a 39 set up fee with no delivery charge.
If you’re adding Sky TV to any of these packages, there is a £10 set up fee, £15 charge for your Sky Q TV box, plus £9.95 delivery.
Bear in mind you’ll also be locked in to an 18-month contract.
After 18 months, the prices switch back to the higher rates of £28.99, £38.99 and £43.99.
But aren’t Sky Broadband prices going up?
It’s not all sweetness and light for Sky Broadband customers.
From Wednesday 1 March 2017 the telecoms giant admitted it was upping line rental prices for everyone (except landline-only customers) from £17.40 a month to £18.99 a month.
That adds around £19 a year to existing customers’ Sky Broadband deals.
In 2016 industry regulator Ofcom found that UK households got an average download speed from their ISP of 28.9Mbps, up from just 22Mbps the year before.
The 2017 report is expected to come out towards the end of March, with industry insiders predicting another big average speed hike.
Ofcom reported in December 2016 that despite big gains in infrastructure in the UK, up to 1.4 million households could still not get decent broadband.
