Topic: BSkyB

Sky Broadband was the fastest growing broadband provider of 2007 after reporting large increases in customers.

It's numbers rose from 260,000 to 1.2 million last year with 44 percent of these being new customers for Sky. What will be good news for the Sky accountants is that around two-thirds of it's customers have decided to pay for their broadband rather than option for the free 2Mbps package, with nearly half bundling their broadband with at least one other Sky product.

While in the past Sky has had a patchy broadband reputation things seem to be changing as they also reported the lowest churn in customers in three years.

James Murdoch, chief executive of BSkyB, taken a swipe at "big incumbent telecoms operators" [read BT] for over-charging their customers.

He claims his company plans to keep driving down the price customers pay for their broadband as well as continually driving up the speed. He also said that while broadband speeds would increase that he doubted that they would be able to cope with television-on-demand or other high bandwidth applications, "it's going to be much more efficient to distribute that via satellite" he claimed, but then he would!

Sky has said that it now has a million customers, although it didn't reveal how many are actually connected to it's LLU services.

This means that a new customer has signed up to it's bundled package every 40 seconds since launching the service back in July last year. Sky uses its own which now covers 70 per cent of the country, to provide broadband to its customers, but also gives the option of connecting through BT, but at a £17 a month premium. The three packages for existing customers who use it's own network range from one being free, and the others cost £5 and £10 per month.

Sky has released some more info on it's new broadband, terrestrial TV and telephony package called Picnic.

The service will be supplied from a new set-top box which will be initially supplied by Sagem, but will not be subsidised as Sky. Each channel will initially be streamed using MPEG-2 although this will move to a MPEG-4 once this has been approved by Ofcom which provides more economical data transfer

Channels available will include Sky One, Sky Movies, Sky Sports 1, a children's channel and a factual channel as well as providing access to the standard FreeView channels. Picnic will allow you to pick and choose which of the services you want with a clearly defined pricing structure, according to the Sky.

Broadband and phone services will be supplied by Sky's LLU network which is available to 70 per cent of the UK population, and allow it to deliver broadband at up to maximum of 16Mbps.

ThinkBroadband have rumoured that BSkyB are to launch a new broadband service called 'Picnic Broadband'.

It's expected to be a broadband only service which differs from it's existing services in that customers do not have to be tied in to any of it's satellite services.
Connections are most likely to use LLU connections from Easynet, which Sky own and currently use for it's LLU service and be connected via a new Netgear wireless  router.

Although Picnic Broadband seems a strange name for a broadband service it seems that quite a few related domain names have been registered to the same person/company who registered skycast.

Sky as you'd expect wouldn't confirm or deny the rumours, but gave thinkbroadband the following statement.

BSkyB announced that at the end of June it added 259,000 new customers to it's broadband bundle, give it a total of 716,000 consumers.

Although not all of these are unbundled (LLU) connections, it has also increased the coverage to 70% of the UK population. It claims it's still ahead of it's target of 3 million broadband customers by 2010. Sky now has a total of 1,150 exchanges which it has unbundled

Also announced today that there are a total of 2.42m telephone lines have now been unbundled in the UK.

Sky broadband is on track to in it's plan to have 700,000 customers using it's services by June this year.

The Guardian reports that broadband connections had nearly doubled to 457,000 at the end of March compared with 197,000 in December last year. The rapid grown is continuing at it also reported a figure of 553,00 connections at the end of March, with the total number of gross bookings standing at 669,000.

Sky now covers 61% of the UK population with 974 unbundled exchanges since being launched in July last year.

Sky plans to extend  it's broadband availability to more homes earlier than it had expected.

It said that it's nationwide coverage would be up to 70 percent of UK homes by June, six months ahead of it's schedule. So far 771 exchanges have been enabled for Sky's services, which means that it's available to 50 percent of homes.

Sky now has 259,000 customers, but it claims to have 84,000 bookings in the system, which mans that either it has a sudden rush of orders, or that it is taking longer than expected to connect customers. Sky admitted it's provisioning was  "slower than we hoped"  during November and December, but said on average, 90 percent of customers are now being connected to broadband within 15 days.

Sky aims to have 700,000 broadband customer by the end of the year, so an acquisition of smaller ISPs could be on the cards.

Sky has launched it's latest deal to tempt customers in a combined TV, broadband and telephony package called See, Speak and Surf.

It includes the usual "up to" 8Mbps connection with a generous 40GB of monthly usage, free evening and weekend calls to geographic landline numbers and an 'entertainment mix'.
There are six mixes available which includes over 100 subscription-only TV channels as well as more than 200 free-to-air TV and radio channels.

The bundle come it a £26 a month and a £20 connection fee, but customers would still have to cough up £11 a month to BT for the line rental, the package also is subject to a twelve month contract.

The downside is that it's only available to customers who's exchange has been unbundled by Sky, at the present this means only 50 percent of the UK population, although Sky hopes to improve this to 70 percent by July.

Free, it's only a four letter word, but is seems to spark of more controversy that if people used the other 'four letter' word.

This time it's not only Talk Talk who are getting blasted, it's BSkyB on the receiving end this time as well.

First off it's NTL on the attack with it's marketing director, James Kydd, calling their offer "hot air" saying that NTL's own deal works out at £162 cheaper than the BSkyB offer for he first year, he said that his company's deal had no installation costs, no BT phone line rental and no connection fee.
To which BSkyB responded "No amount of special offers packed with small print can hide the fact that some NTL customers could save nearly £300 a year by switching to Sky.' Confused yet?

Next comes BT CEO Sir Christopher Bland on the attack saying that the BSkyB would find it "unsustainable to provide free services" and that they would struggle to provide nationwide services via LLU. He has got a point, both BSkyB and Talk Talk cannot compete with BT for coverage, but then they haven't inherited a nationwide network and then been dragging their heels to let competitors in.