It was in the air for some time, but now there is the almost official confirmation: soon Sky WiFi will also be available in the cities covered by Fastweb’s fiber-mixed copper network
Sky’s fiber-optic connection could soon expand well beyond the current 149 cities reached by the service because, according to the latest rumors, based on new technical parameters published on a page of Sky WiFi’s online help, Sky would be very close to offering the subscription also to customers reached by Fastweb’s FTTC network.
At the moment Sky Fibra100% and Sky WiFi (which is the Sky offer that includes both the fiber connection and a WiFi router optimized to stream Sky programs) relies exclusively on the pure fiber network FTTH (Fiber to the Home) of Open Fiber. Which is a connection with excellent performance, but has not yet a widespread distribution in the Italian territory. Much higher is the coverage of Fastweb FTTC (Fiber to the Cabinet, i.e. fiber to the cabinet in the street), although the performance is lower. But lower by how much? Will it be enough to guarantee the quality of the service and the streaming of Sky’s contents?
Sky WiFi and Fastweb: the advantages of the agreement
The FTTH connection guarantees performances up to a theoretical maximum of 1 Gbps, against 200 Mbps of a FTTC connection. The speed of the FTTC network is one-fifth that of FTTH, but it is still more than enough to stream multiple audio-video streams simultaneously. For this reason, the Sky-Fastweb agreement is technically able to guarantee the quality of service of Sky WiFi, but it also has a coverage that is now quite high in many large and medium-sized Italian cities.
Sky WiFi: coverage
Sky WiFi debuted on June 16, 2020 in 26 Italian cities, but soon expanded to 149 cities, covered since August 25 always on Open Fiber’s FTTH network. That Sky would also use Fastweb’s network was in the air for quite a while, since the agreement between the two companies dates back to December 2019. But not only: during the presentation of Sky WiFi the CEO of Sky Italia, Maximo Ibarra, had announced the enlargement of the coverage after the summer.
The new page on the online help
A definitive confirmation of all this are the new instructions for the configuration of a free modem compatible with FTTC technology, published on the online help of Sky WiFi. This means, without any doubt, that the Sky WiFi offer is expanding to many other cities.