Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Gadgets & Tech Sky Broadband - Ongoing Review Of The Service

we not had ours that long, but again the service has been top notch... am glad i listened to ur advice and chose to change matty..

Good good, glad ye happy with it fella, hope it continues to be good for ye

cheers dude !!

Hehehehehe been doing some FTPing tonight from one of me servers (uploaded 23GB in just 4 days to a server - started downloading some stuff tonight) and I must have the best 8Mbps connection ever... it is constantly FASTER then 8Mbps lmao.

So much for "upto" 8Mbps haha! This aint supposed to happen surely:

Hmmmm... just been browsing around my account online, and I have the option to change to a Sky Landline - this means a launch of their landline service is imminent!!

The cost is £10.00 per month and makes you independent of BT, with your TV, phone and broadband now on a single bill.

I shall be taking it, BT have been screwing me for far too long now, they are charging me for call barring and caller ID - I only have the line for fecking internet and business, its hardly ever plugged in lately the robbing gits argh long live Sky, at least now it wont be £18 a month or whatever it is BT charge me, a nice round £10.00 per month suits me fine.

Thanks Sky

Ive just phoned up Sky to change my line rental over to them (I didnt fancy doing it online as I wanted more details of how it would work etc first).

When you phone the normal customer services, they can't do the change for you, you have to telephone Sky Talk customer services instead.

08702 41 99 99 - Telephone number for Sky Talk customer services.

Call was answered straight away, they will be arranging everything for me and will inform BT to stop billing me and of the changes etc...

They have also given me the line rental at half price for the first 3 months to say thank you as im one of the first customers to take it haha!

The change to using Sky for your landline as opposed to BT will NOT affect any services on your line (eg. your broadband), it will not require a change of number, and there will be no "downtime". You cannot currently use the service however, if you have a telephone linked alarm system (I assume such as the pensioner/disabled systems and the likes of ADT - they can clarify this for you).

I will recieve a welcome pack within the next ten days, plus confirmation of the line change and updated billing, and the change should be active within the next 10 days. I will now pay £10.00 per month to Sky instead of £18.00 per month to BT for my line rental!

Result!

So for a summary, the details and price of the base package now is:

- Sky Digital TV
- Sky Talk Freetime
- 2Mbps Broadband
- Sky Talk Landline
- £26.00 per month

The beauty of it is now it's all in one bill and independent of BT - and of course cheaper!

Two updates:

Sky Talk Landline
My service has been activated, and now Sky are charging me £10.00 for me landline rental instead of the £18.50 BT were somehow taking off me every month...

The service offers quite a few free features, like standard ones such as voicemail, 141, 1471 etc, but also features that BT charge you for such as caller display and automatic number witholding.

The welcome pack included a proper booklet for Sky Talk Landline etc, however Sky are still not promoting it, so I am assuming they are keeping it low key atm whilst they work out the most efficient way to transfer people over and also to help prevent mass over-demand of the service like they had with the broadband.

£8.50 per month saved on me landline rental cost, cheers Sky!

Sky Broadband
For the first time since I got Sky Broadband, I experienced a minor outage last night. I am not sure if it was related to Sky Broadband itself, or more a connection fook up at LINX or summit, basically for a very short period of maybe 5 minutes, I was unable to access any non-UK servers, including Wikiwirral of course, which is located in Holland.

It all came back after 5 minutes or so, and during the time I was able to access my own websites (on UK servers), but none of my US or NL servers.

Not a problem, as I say, it is more likely to be a fook up at LINX or similar rather or maybe even a DDoS resulting in the null routing of a carrier/peer I was using than Sky itself, but still its worth a mention.

Other then that, 9 months on, absolutely fantastic service!

My Uncle Just Moved House.

Previous and New Address Had Sky.

Before the move, we called sky to say what do we do?
They said a week before you move give us a call.
We Did.

We were advised to call again to inform them when we were
at the new address.
We Did.

1 week later we get a call to say "Your Broad Band is Now Up And Running".
After unpacking the computers, no connection?

Called SKY ?
They said it had been "Ceased" ?
We explained about the call a week ago saying that the broad band was up and running.
Not interested.

Now they will have to reactive the connection again,
and possibly loose the current family e-mail address?
But were not sure of that yet, we have to wait for the pack
to arrive with the account details.

Summary
Even though we followed SKY's Advice, And were informed it was all up and running.
They Still Got it all WRONG.

Customer service just passes the Buck

I had similar problems with Tiscali when moving house.

I must admit, my sky has been pretty reliable in the past few months :), Just hope i never have to change anything

I told you about the reasons behind this already Mark, there is extreme over-subscription at the moment on all Wirral DSLAM's, they are trying to get more capacity turned up, but BT Openworld arnt very willing to move their feet.

So new connections are fast becoming a pain in the arse to get (I know your not seeing this as a new connection, but in reality it is), as is getting BT Openworld to activate telephone lines. This is why Easynet are still trying to get access to exchanges, but BT have stopped them since Sky bought them out.

This leads to two problems, which both affect the end customer, the first being the fact that right now, Sky are struggling to meet the intense demand for the service locally, because they have to rely on BT Openworld to upgrade their DSLAM capacity, and secondly, because they are still relying on BT Openworld to activate lines for DSL.

Sky have already supposedly "poached" more then 300,000 BT Broadband customers since launching their service (as well as a further nearly 800,000 from other ISP's), so BT are not happy and trying to do everything they can to slow Sky down and damage them, the easiest way being making life hard for Sky to turn up new lines etc...

Sky have obviously lost track of this somewhere along the line, reading between the lines, it seems that what has actually happened, is they have requested activation on the new line from BT Openworld, and BT have given them a date for activation. They have either then hit problems with over-subscription on the DSLAM, or BT have have not stuck to the date for activation (more likely given the circumstances). After a certain period with no connection, Sky's systems for some reason then see's you a new customer which is part of the resulting problem, but also BT wipe it from their activations list, and then Sky have to request it again.

Ive just got a letter from BT asking me to pay £2.50 to leave them for Sky landline... which I am gladly going to pay, because the sooner I am rid of the cheating ... the better. BT are in trouble, and they know it, its only a matter of time before they either go bankrupt of Sky just end up buying them out.

Keep us updated on what happens.

It the wrong advise from SKY Customer Support my gripe is.
If the correct advice had been given, then we could be 7 days ahead of the activation, while boxes were still being unpacked.

Not the end of the world, but Naughty for passing on the
wrong information, and giving the wrong information.

Not Good SKY

For new customers to Sky, make that a free Sky+ box atm, as I can give you a voucher code which will entitle you to a free Sky+ box instead of a standard box.

Cheers to Waddi for reminding me to update this lol.

Well i'm cancelling my VM and becoming a New Sky Customer.

I will keep you updated.
I become a TV Customer this Saturday, but the broadband will be a little after.

Not that i wasn't on the whole unhappy with Virgin Media
just more about the direction and lack of infer structure.
So made the jump with the "Fee SKY + BOX" and Sky re-paying
me for the BT Reconnection

Its now or never for me and goodbye VM After 12 years.
I think i will listen to them beg first lol

Matty the prices you have above are correct but you still
have to pay £11 BT.
But i got the 8mb thrown in too.
And x2 mixes which then brought it down to £21 as i couldn't
make up my mind lol.

You dont, heres the breakdown of the monthly charge for the absolute base charge:

- Sky Digital TV - £16.00 per month
- Sky Talk Freetime - Free
- 2Mbps Broadband - Free
- Sky Talk Landline - £10.00 per month
- £26.00 per month

Remember im quoting the absolute base charge, nothing extra. I dont pay BT anything, as my landline is now with Sky, if I have a problem with it, it is probably BT Openreach who fix any hardware problems on the line, but it is Sky who I contact to resolve any issues.

For those who are in a contract with BT of some sort and can't choose Sky for their landline, they can take BT's lowest price line rental which works out at 50p per month extra, however I was somehow being charged £18.50 per month by BT despite never using the line for calls etc, so I advise people to keep an eye on their bills.

One other thing to remember is that Sky arnt yet advertising their landline, probably to see how it goes first, but it is available, you have to contact them atm, although you can also change to them online via My Sky.