Sunday 27 November 2016 8:32 pm

Sky gears up for launch of mobile service with price details this week

Details of Sky’s long awaited move in to mobile are expected to be fleshed out this week

The pay TV giant will unveil its mobile phone subscription packages designed to complete its so-called quadplay offering, meant to encourage existing customers to sign up for more services.

Sky’s rivals fear it will try to undercut them on mobile pricing in order to bolster its TV and internet subscriber base.

Pay TV customers are expected to be offered the service at first, with aggressive prices to challenge the likes of BT’s EE, O2, Three and Vodafone. It’s also thought Sky could offer mobile customers exclusive access to its TV and sports content.

Analysts at Macquarie think Sky will charge an average of £10 per month for a package including 4GB of data. For the same price, BT Mobile offers an eighth of the data allowance and EE half that.

Macquarie reckons Sky could pull in three million subscribers by 2021, putting it ahead of Virgin Media as the biggest of the so-called virtual operators that rent wholesale capacity on one of the four main networks.

Sky’s network will operate on O2’s mobile spectrum.