Status

Still trading

Wholesale network

Openreach

Who owns the brand

Sky's value brand, retailing over the Openreach network alongside TalkTalk and Plusnet.

NOW Broadband: Sky's Value Brand on the Openreach Network, Reviewed

NOW Broadband is Sky's cheaper brand, retailing over the Openreach network like TalkTalk and Plusnet. It is the same wholesale line the more expensive brands use, sold with less around it, and the TV unbundled into monthly passes rather than baked into a contract.

Same line, different packaging

The connection is an Openreach connection, so availability, speed tiers and the engineer who turns up if something breaks are identical to the several other brands on that network. Nothing about NOW makes a line faster or slower at your address than Sky's own product would be.

What differs is everything commercial. Fewer tiers, a plainer router, support arrangements pitched at a lower price point, and the television sold as a separate subscription you can start and stop rather than a bundle with a term.

That is a real proposition for one specific customer: somebody who wants a competent connection, does not want to be sold a package, and would rather pay for sport in the months there is sport than for twelve months there is not.

Where the value actually is

The passes are the interesting part. Buying entertainment or sport by the month, cancellable, is structurally different from a discounted bundle on a two-year term, and for a household that watches seasonally it is cheaper by a wide margin.

Run the arithmetic over the whole term rather than per month. A bundle at a lower monthly figure across twenty-four months frequently costs more in total than a plain broadband contract plus four months of passes, and the bundle is the one you cannot stop.

The other saving is in what you are not buying. No multiroom, no set-top hardware to return, no installation of anything beyond the router.

The trade-offs to know before ordering

Support is the honest one. A value brand funds its support at value-brand levels, and the difference is not usually in whether a fault gets fixed but in how long you spend arranging it. If a household is intolerant of that, the premium brands on the same line are selling exactly that tolerance.

The router is the second. Entry-level hardware is adequate for a flat and marginal for a house with thick walls, and the usual outcome is buying a mesh system separately, which erases part of the saving and should therefore be in the comparison from the start.

And the price step at the end of the term applies here as everywhere. A value brand's standard rate is still a standard rate, and it is not competitive with its own new-customer pricing.

How it compares on the same network

Against TalkTalk and Plusnet the question is genuinely just price, contract length and which support experience you would rather have, because all three deliver the same Openreach product. There is no technical tiebreaker, which is why these comparisons come down to the number in front of you on the day.

Against Sky's own broadband, you are choosing whether the television and the service level are worth the difference. Sky additionally uses CityFibre's network in areas where CityFibre has built, so in those postcodes the two brands may not even be offering the same technology.

Against a full-fibre alternative network, the comparison stops being about brands. If an altnet has reached your street with a symmetric product, that is a different class of connection and no Openreach reseller can match it where Openreach has not built.

What to check at your address

Check whether Openreach full fibre has reached the property, because that single fact determines which NOW tiers exist for you and whether the upload speed will be usable for video calls. A copper-based tier and a full-fibre tier from the same brand are not variations of one product.

Then check the term length against your own plans, since the flexibility NOW sells on television does not automatically extend to the broadband contract. A rolling TV pass alongside a twenty-four-month line commitment is a common and slightly misleading combination.

And diarise the renewal date the day you sign. See the rest of the market, Sky's own product and how the TV bundles compare.

Why one company sells the same line twice

It looks like cannibalisation and it is deliberate. A premium brand cannot discount to meet a cheap competitor without teaching its existing customers that its prices are negotiable, so it launches a second brand with a different name, a thinner product and no obligation to match the first one's service levels. The expensive customers stay expensive and the price-sensitive ones are captured rather than lost.

Nearly every large UK provider has done a version of this, and knowing it changes how you read a comparison table. Two brands sitting several pounds apart may be the same company selling the same wholesale product, in which case the gap is buying service and packaging rather than connectivity.

The practical use of that knowledge is at renewal. If the value brand's new-customer price is well below what you are paying on the premium brand, that is a number worth quoting when you ring to renegotiate. It is the same group's own pricing for the same line, and it is harder to argue with than a competitor's offer.

Frequently asked questions