Sky Broadband is set to issue a challenge to its rivals as it prepares to launch an advertising campaign, claiming to be the only internet service provider to offer truly unlimited broadband to its customers.
This comes after Sky decided to remove its fair usage policy, which limits “excessive” downloading, on its top-tier Sky Broadband Max product. The company added that because it does not cap download speeds at peak times, known as “traffic shaping”, it offers genuinely “unlimited” broadband.
“Customers have told us that they want ‘unlimited’ broadband to be exactly that, so we’ve acted on their feedback,” said a spokesperson for Sky. “We believe that we are now the only major broadband provider to offer truly ‘unlimited’ broadband.”
Sky Broadband will still maintain its “acceptable usage policy”, but this limits the type of content that people can download rather than how much.
Sky Broadband is likely to launch its new campaign towards the end of the month, advertising over TV, newspapers and magazines, the internet and through direct marketing, triggering an expected marketing battle with rival ISPs.
“We believe that there is no other ISP that makes both of these promises, and we are going to start talking about this more openly in our marketing,” the spokesperson continued.
“This is likely to open up a new front in the highly competitive broadband marketplace, where most advertising has so far focused on either price or headline download speeds.”
The advertising campaign will annoy rivals who have run into trouble because their marketing of “unlimited broadband” has been deemed misleading. An ad campaign for Virgin Media last July was banned by the ASA because it promoted fast download speeds but capped these speeds at peak times. Meanwhile, the ASA criticised Orange last year for advertising “unlimited” broadband when it operated a fair usage policy on its packages.
Sky Broadband is now the fifth largest ISP in the UK, with 1.6 million broadband customers on its books last June.
Posted by Ellie on September 22nd 2008 in Broadband, Orange Broadband, Sky Broadband, Virgin Media
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Ben Waugh said on 22 Sep 2008 at 9:00 am #
A friend of mine just emailed me one of your articles from a while back. I read that one a few more. Really enjoy your blog. Thanks
Dan said on 25 Sep 2008 at 3:07 pm #
It took me a while to find, but the Terms and Conditions, including the “acceptable usage policy” can be found here: http://www.sky.com/portal/site/skycom/skyproducts/broadband/terms
Basically it says don’t do bad things.
It’s better than I thought it’d be.