To have a Sky dish or not is a topic of debate in the General Election, apparently you are posh if you did not have a dish many years ago. To complicate the arguments the current situation is that you can get Sky broadband cheaper if you sign up via the NOW brand i.e. Full Fibre 100 is currently £25/month on NOW versus £28/month if you go direct to Sky.
NOW used to advertise Fab and Super Fibre too, which utilised VDSL2/FTTC services over the Openreach network, but with Openreach full-fibre now covering 44% of the UK the brand powered by Sky has decided to drop the slower services for a simple full-fibre line-up.
In both cases on the full fibre it is an 18 month contract and the same £5 setup fee – though qualifying customers will get that £5 refunded. In terms of price rise the price may vary during the contract, but no set formula exists for this. After the 18 month minimum term if you remain on a rolling contract the price is £44/month but if happy to recontract for another period a lower price may be available ie. standard practice for broadband deals.
Where this crosses over and complicates the Sky TV dish debate is that it is often cheaper to buy the NOW TV pass to access the Sky TV channels, e.g. NOW Entertainment pass is on offer for £6.99/month for 6 months down from the usual £9.99/month for new customers. The Cinema pass i.e. Sky Movies is also on a £6.99/month for 6 months offer. The Sports pass costs a fair bit more at £26/month. Looking at Sky, the old satellite dish service Sky Q starts at £31/month or you can have the more modern Sky Stream where an Entertainment and Netflix bundle is £26/month with HD content. The cost of a Now Entertainment pass and Neflix HD subscription is £17.98/m for six months, then £20.98/month, if happy with some adverts on the next you can cut the price another £6/month by buying the Netflix Standard with adverts plan at £4.99/month.
Another advantage of the NOW passes is if paying the standard price you can stop/start your subscription e.g. add the Cinema pass for just 3 to 4 months during the long winter nights, rather than tying into the 18 month or longer contracts the main Sky TV products usually have.
With Sky moving towards the Sky Stream product as the standard service the day of satellite dishes adorning millions of homes are approaching an end, it just needs products like Freely to become more widely available so that viewing live terrestrial channels is simpler over a broadband connection. It will probably be many years before people get their satellite dish taken down, but for those that always thought them unsightly the news they are slowly going to dissappear will be seen as a blessing. Browse Now Broadband Deals here.
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That is a bit stupid and also a bit early, if only 44% of the UK is covered by Openreach fibre then there is still over half that is not. I did think about going to NoW if I decided to go back to FTTC, but that is not going to happen now.
Interesting that they are including a VOIP voice service with this (terms say “Talk service uses your broadband connection to make calls”. So the NOW/Sky differentiation is different from the plusNet/BT differentiation where plusNet full fibre has no voice feature. This looks like they are trying to get the more cost concious customers who might otherwise go with another supplier. No mention of what the annual price rise will be. If this is applied in March or April then how good this price is depends on which month of the year you sign up on.
Regards the voice over internet, you can use you own voip phone directly on an Ethernet connection, I’ve been using Plusnet with my own voip phone provided by A&A , you don’t need to use the Sky special port.
I haven’t looked at the call charges for NOW VoIP, but when I looked at Sky’s a few weeks ago for a friend, it was not cheap, there are better deals around.
If you don’t want a “traditional” Landline (albeit VoIP) for outgoing calls it may still be useful for incoming for those that have to pay a higher cost for calls to mobiles. And of course you can use outgoing 0800/0808 at no cost.