topic Re: Why is Sky Full Fibre only 900Mbpdls? in Broadband

Why is Sky Full Fibre only 900Mbpdls?

GothBoy — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:08:58 GMT

I am in desperate need to update my broadband. I'm on Sky ADSL2 <24Mbps crawling at 12Mbps and it's becoming an issue. I've checked at my address and there's Openreach Full Fibre at up to 1.6Gbps (as offered by EE) as well as Virgin Media. I'm not going cable so wanted to stay with Sky.

However, Sky only offers up to 900Mbps as there's no Citylink here (and never will be). As Sky uses the Openreach network why is it limited to 900Mbps and not 1.6Gbps? It's annoying that I can get 1.6Gbps at a significantly lower price than I'm currently playing for 12Mbps ADSL!

Anyone know why?

Re: Why is Sky Full Fibre only 900Mbpdls?

GD1 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:46:31 GMT

@GothBoy Only Sky know the reason.

Re: Why is Sky Full Fibre only 900Mbpdls?

Chrisee — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 06:14:32 GMT

@GothBoy given that Openrech currently use GPON where up to 30 lines on a distribution share a downstream link delivering 2.48Gb/s selling multiple connections delivering up to 1.6Gb/s is fairly pointless and no ISP, including EE, have any control over speeds sold in any distribution point. Statistically it is very rare for customers to use even half of the bandwidth they buy which is why the system works.

In practice you would rarely if ever see a gain between 900Mb/s or 1600Mb/s except exceptionally at quiet times with the occasional download where the server operator allows higher bandwidth connections and your neighbours are not downloading at the sametime .

Re: Why is Sky Full Fibre only 900Mbpdls?

TimmyBGood — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 07:16:07 GMT

@GothBoy

I'd imagine that Sky may well have an increase in maximum speed planned purely for competition purposes: they've only recently had a router model which could cope (the Max Hub being limited by a 1Gbs WAN port)

As @Chrisee indicates, there's really no need for any such bandwidth in a domestic setting.

Re: Why is Sky Full Fibre only 900Mbpdls?

GothBoy — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 08:06:24 GMT

Thanks for the answers everyone. Ironically, my connection went down not long after posting that and still isn't back the next morning, despite all the Sky tests saying there's no problems. Maybe they're punishing me (just kidding!).