NOW Broadband Superfast

NOW Superfast offers average download speeds of 67Mbps at peak times to homes yet to be passed by full fibre.

It includes a home phone line, the Sky Broadband Hub and access to Sky's customer service, making it a simple, low-cost option for smaller households.

It's becoming harder to get, though, with Openreach stopping sales of part fibre in areas where full fibre is available, so if your home can get full fibre, NOW Full Fibre 100 is the better choice.

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Quick verdict

NOW Superfast offers average download speeds of 67Mbps and uploads of 16Mbps over a part fibre connection, which is enough for one or two people to stream in HD, browse and video call. At our test address, the minimum guaranteed download speed was 60Mbps. You also get the same extras as NOW's full fibre plans, including a home phone line, the Sky Broadband Hub, Sky Broadband Shield parental controls and Sky's customer support.

Speeds on part fibre vary by address, so the personalised estimate you're given when ordering is the figure that matters. If it's well below 67Mbps, it's worth checking whether Virgin Media or an independent full fibre network reaches your home, as they don't depend on Openreach's rollout.

The bigger issue is Sky Superfast. It's currently £1 per month cheaper, and otherwise it's the same service, with the same router, home phone line and customer support. Unless NOW's price drops, there's no reason to choose it over Sky.

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At a glance

NOW Superfast broadband plan

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What does NOW Superfast include?

NOW Superfast comes with the same hardware and features as NOW's full fibre plans:

The connection:

• 67Mbps average download and 16Mbps average upload
• Personalised minimum guaranteed download speed, 60Mbps at our test address
• No caps on how much you can use
• Runs over your current phone line, so no new cable needs to be installed

Everything else:

• Digital home phone line, with pay-as-you-go calls or call plans from £9 per month
• Sky Broadband Hub, with a 3Mbps per-room WiFi guarantee
• Sky Broadband Shield parental controls
• Option to add Sky WiFi Max for £6 per month, or Sky Essential TV at its standard price

Getting connected is usually straightforward. In most cases, Superfast is switched on remotely and you just plug in the router, with no engineer visit needed. A £5 credit check fee is taken when you order and refunded on your first bill.

If your speed drops below your minimum guarantee and NOW can't fix it within 30 days, you can leave your contract without paying an exit fee.

The Sky Broadband Hub is more than capable at 67Mbps, so most homes won't need an upgrade for speed. Sky WiFi Max is only worth considering if WiFi doesn't reach every room, as it adds Sky WiFi Pods and raises the guarantee to 10Mbps per room.

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Who is NOW Superfast broadband best for?

NOW Superfast is a part fibre broadband package that will suit small to medium sized homes, with customers able to boost WiFi with optional add-ons if they need to.

The average download speed of 67Mbps at peak times will be adequate for a range of online activities including:

• One or two people streaming in HD or 4K
• Online gaming, though large downloads will take a while
• Working from home and video calls
• Uploading photos and videos to social media

The included home phone line is what sets it apart. Many rivals now sell broadband-only plans, so for anyone who relies on a landline, whether to keep a long-standing number, for a personal alarm or simply to stay in touch with family, NOW includes one without charging extra. Call plans are available too, from £9 per month for evenings and weekends.

Bear in mind that your speed depends on how far you live from the street cabinet. Larger households, or homes a long way from the cabinet, may find 67Mbps stretched at busy times, so check the speed estimate you're given before ordering. You can improve WiFi coverage with Sky WiFi Max for £6 per month, but it won't increase your broadband speed.

Since NOW is now powered by Sky, it's worth comparing against Sky Superfast, which uses the same network, router and customer service. Sky TV can be added to NOW Superfast, but only at standard price, so if you want TV, Sky's broadband and TV bundles are better value.

If full fibre does arrive in your area, it's worth switching when your contract allows, as NOW Full Fibre 100 offers faster, more consistent speeds.

Check availability for NOW Broadband in your area.

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How much does NOW Superfast cost?

NOW Superfast costs £24 per month on a 24-month contract, and is the only part fibre plan NOW offers.

There's a £5 credit check fee to pay when you order, but it's refunded on your first bill. Here's how the deal looks:

The monthly price listed in the table above covers broadband and a home phone line, with calls charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. Evening & Weekend and Anytime call plans can be added for £9 and £18 per month respectively, which we look at in more detail below.

You'll get the Sky Broadband Hub, along with the My Sky app and Sky Broadband Shield parental controls. For £6 per month, Sky WiFi Max upgrades you to the WiFi 6 Sky Max Hub and adds up to three Sky WiFi Pods to extend coverage around your home.

The contract runs for 24 months, and any call plan you add comes with its own 24-month minimum term. Once your contract ends, the price rises to £46 per month, but NOW will let you know before that happens, giving you the chance to recontract at a lower price or switch provider.

NOW's terms say prices may rise during your contract, without saying by how much. Its last two increases, in July 2025 and July 2026, were both £3 per month, so it's sensible to expect a similar rise each year.

NOW Superfast + call plans

NOW Broadband come with a home phone line as standard and this is provided at no extra cost for Superfast package customers.

Calls will be on a pay as you go basis as standard, with UK calls charged at 27p per minute, plus a 25p connection charge.

Those who want to add an inclusive call plan can choose from the following options:

These call plans only cover calls of up to one hour in duration, so for longer calls customers need to remember to hang up and re-dial.

Sky Talk taken out as a new customer with NOW Broadband is also subject to a minimum term of 24 months, and so the talk plan can't be cancelled early.

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NOW Superfast Broadband + Sky TV

NOW Superfast can be bundled with Sky Essential TV and the new Sky Stream box, which streams TV content over the broadband connection and doesn't need a satellite dish.

This the current price of NOW Superfast and Sky TV:

New customers can get £3 per month off Sky Essential TV, bringing it down from £18 to £15 per month. You can add it when ordering NOW Superfast, but you'll pay the same as taking Sky TV on its own, as there are no bundle discounts for NOW Broadband customers.

Sky Essential TV includes over 100 live channels, among them Sky Atlantic, plus Netflix Standard with Ads and discovery+. Everything is in Full HD as standard, and you can add premium packs on a monthly basis, including Sky Sports, Sky Cinema, Sky Kids and TNT Sports. The Sky Stream box also brings popular apps such as Disney+, Apple TV+ and Paramount+ together in one place.

The catch is the price. NOW Superfast with Sky Essential TV comes to £39 per month, while Sky Broadband with Sky Essential TV costs £35. That's £4 per month less for the same router, home phone line and customer service, a saving of £96 over a two-year contract.

If you want Sky TV, it makes far more sense to bundle it with Sky Broadband than to add it to NOW.

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How does NOW Superfast compare?

At £24 per month, NOW Superfast is no longer among the cheapest broadband deals, and is now priced at or above most of its main part fibre rivals:

Sky Superfast is the clearest alternative. It's £1 per month cheaper, has the same 67Mbps download and 16Mbps upload speeds, and comes with the same £5 refundable setup fee. As NOW is now powered by Sky, everything else is identical too, from the Sky Broadband Hub and home phone line to the customer service team. Choosing NOW means paying £24 more over two years for exactly the same service.

Plusnet's 66Mb plan has a lower monthly price at £22.99, plus a £50 Reward Card, but there's a £9.99 setup fee and fixed rises of £4 per month in March 2027 and again in March 2028. It's broadband only, with no home phone line, and comes with the Plusnet Hub Two, a WiFi 5 router comparable to the Sky Broadband Hub. It's a reasonable option if you don't need a landline, but the price rises make it more expensive than Sky over a full contract.

Vodafone Fibre 2 costs the same £24 per month as NOW, with similar speeds of 65Mbps download and a slightly faster 18Mbps upload. It has no setup fee and comes with £75 of bill credit, plus £2 per month off for Vodafone mobile customers. Like NOW, it includes a home phone line, but Vodafone's router supports WiFi 6, so it's the better-equipped plan. Its prices rise by £3.50 each April.

Elsewhere, BT charges an extra £5 per month for a home phone line, which makes NOW's included landline better value for anyone who needs one. Budget provider Onestream can be cheaper still, but its router is much more basic, and a landline isn't included.

Over a 24-month contract, Vodafone works out cheapest at around £585 after its bill credit, followed by Sky at around £606 and Plusnet at around £616 after its Reward Card. NOW comes last at around £630, assuming it continues with £3 rises each July.

NOW Superfast offers a good service, but it's hard to recommend at the moment. Sky gives you exactly the same package for less, and Vodafone adds a better router and more money back.

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How fast is NOW Superfast broadband?

NOW Superfast offers average download speeds of 67Mbps at peak times, and average upload speeds of 16Mbps.

These speeds are received by at least 50% of NOW Broadband customers during the busiest hours of 8pm to 10pm, when the network can experience slower speeds due to congestion.

That's the fastest speed tier generally available on Openreach's part fibre network, so NOW isn't holding anything back here. It matches Sky Superfast exactly and is on par with Plusnet and Vodafone's equivalent plans, with Vodafone slightly ahead on uploads at 18Mbps.

The connection is delivered using part-fibre technology, so the fibre cable is only installed to the green street cabinet, and then the copper telephone line is used to a home.

Because of this it's worth being aware speeds can vary more than with full fibre (FTTP), especially where a property is further from its local street cabinet. Homes close to the cabinet may get the full 67Mbps or more, while those a kilometre or more away can find themselves with closer to half that. Shared cabling with neighbours and ageing wiring can also cause dips that full fibre customers simply don't experience.

When it delivers close to the advertised speed, 67Mbps is enough for one or two people to stream in 4K, video call and browse at the same time without issues. It starts to struggle with bigger demands. A 50GB game download takes well over an hour and a half, and the 16Mbps upload speed makes backing up photos and videos slow, with everything else on the connection slowing down while it runs. For larger households, or anyone at the lower end of the speed range, it's likely to feel stretched in the evenings.

Minimum guaranteed speed

NOW Broadband have signed up to Ofcom's code of conduct on broadband speeds however, so they will provide customers with personalised estimates and a minimum guaranteed download speed during the checkout process.

The minimum guaranteed download speed effectively provides a service guarantee and if customers don't receive at least this speed or faster, and NOW can't resolve any issues within 30 days of being notified of problems, the customer should be free to leave their contract early and without any penalty.

We tested the minimum speed on NOW Superfast at a location with Openreach part fibre coverage and were given the below speed estimates and service guarantee:

The 60Mbps guarantee is a good result, at around 90% of the advertised average. But the estimated range is far wider than on NOW's full fibre plans, spanning almost 20Mbps, which shows how much less predictable part fibre is. Its lower end, 55Mbps, actually sits below the guarantee, so a customer could receive a speed within their quoted estimate and still be entitled to complain.

That makes the guarantee more valuable here than on full fibre, where speeds rarely move far from the advertised figure. It's a useful safety net, though it's the same one Sky Superfast customers get, for £1 less per month.

Remember however speeds vary between locations and a different address could be given a different minimum guaranteed speed.

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Router

NOW Superfast customers will be provided with the Sky Broadband Hub at no extra cost.

The Sky Broadband Hub is a decent router offering wireless support up to the WiFi 5, or 802.11ac, protocol, originally released by Sky in September 2019.

Sky Broadband Hub. Credit: Choose.co.uk

It's a good upgrade over the previous NOW Hub Two, which was a rebranded version of the older Sky Q Hub, which had just five internal antennae and noticeably struggled to provide coverage around a home.

The Sky Broadband Hub offers:

• Dual-band wireless channels (2.4GHz and 5GHz), with smart channel selection
• Support up to WiFi 5 or 802.11ac
• 4 x Ethernet LAN ports for wired connections
• 8 internal antennae
• WPA2 security

It's a reasonable router, but will be best suited for small to medium-sized homes where the wireless signal doesn't have too far, or too many walls, to navigate.

NOW Broadband customers do have the option to upgrade to the Sky Max Hub however, as well as access up to three Sky WiFi Pods with the Sky WiFi Max add-on, which costs £6 per month extra.

The Sky Max Hub offers WiFi 6 and WPA3 encryption, while the WiFi Max whole home wireless guarantee promises minimum download speeds of 10Mbps in every room.

For NOW Superfast, though, the upgrade is hard to justify. The Sky Broadband Hub can deliver several hundred megabits per second over WiFi, so on a 67Mbps line it's nowhere near its limit. The broadband connection is what limits your speed, not the router, and switching to the Sky Max Hub won't make your connection any faster. The same goes for WiFi 6. Its improvements show up on much faster connections and in homes with lots of devices competing for bandwidth, neither of which a part fibre line will really put to the test.

The cost matters too. At £6 per month, Sky WiFi Max adds a quarter to the price of the plan, taking NOW Superfast to £30 per month, or an extra £144 over a two-year contract. That's a lot to spend on a router that won't improve your speed.

The one situation where it's worth considering is poor coverage. If WiFi doesn't reach a back bedroom, loft conversion or home office, the Sky WiFi Pods are what fix it, as they extend the signal around the home in a mesh network. While the standard Sky Broadband Hub does come with a wall-to-wall WiFi guarantee of 3Mbps in every room, that won't improve your signal. If a room falls short, you can claim back a month's subscription, but that's it. For homes with real blackspots, the Pods are the only way to actually fix the problem.

Overall, NOW Broadband Superfast customers now benefit from the upgraded hardware of Sky, and for most homes on this plan, the included Sky Broadband Hub is all they'll need. Sky WiFi Max is only worth adding for larger homes with genuine WiFi blackspots.

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Verdict: Is Now Superfast broadband any good?

NOW Broadband Superfast is now the provider's sole part fibre package, with eligible customers getting the fastest speed their line can handle.

It's a good, low-cost part fibre plan, and unlike some budget deals, it still includes a home phone line as standard, which makes it a sensible choice for anyone who still needs a landline.

Customers also now get better features through parent company Sky, with NOW Broadband packages now coming with the improved Sky Broadband Hub, as well as access to the My Sky app, Sky Broadband Shield parental controls, and optional Sky WiFi Max boosters.

However, there are drawbacks to the new 'powered by Sky' plans. NOW TV bundle discounts have gone, and while it's possible to add Sky TV at the checkout, the price isn't discounted, unlike with Sky broadband. Taking Sky TV with Sky's own broadband currently works out £4 per month cheaper.

Sky also undercuts NOW on broadband alone. Sky Superfast broadband is currently £1 per month cheaper for the same speeds, router, home phone line and customer service, though the gap between the two does vary with promotions.

Ultimately, NOW Superfast is a solid part fibre package with Sky's reputable customer service behind it. But while Sky is cheaper, it's worth checking both before ordering, and anyone who wants Sky TV will be better off with Sky Superfast.