Blogs My First Experience With Sky

we've had sky for about 20 years (give or take) and i can safely say we've NEVER had a problem with them.

people tend to hear nightmare stories because how many people are going to sit on the net and right a blog/report about how wonderful an experience they've had with a big corporation. this only happens when the company has such a bad reputation that anything good comes as a surprise.

we've had the HD service for a few years now, and have only had to make one phone call to sky about a problem... the box/signal or something was freezing up. whilst we were on the phone with them, they rebooted our system and it works fine.

heck we don't even have the thing off at night like you're theoretically supposed to.

 

It can hardly get much worse can it?
At least looking on the bright side you should be able to get a decent net connection eventually

 

Sky, BT, O2. So many companies know that their poor service won't lose as many customers as they gain with a decent ad campaign.

 

Nah... My experience of O2/ Be has been very positive. Luvin my 15/1 Mbit connection!! Compared to my previous experience of ISPs (Nildram, Plusnet, Bulldog/ C&W) O2 have been very efficient and actually have English speaking telephone support!!

As for Sky it sounds to me like the blog author would be wanting to take a Small Claims action against them... I certainly would!!

Bob

 

Yeah I am a fan of Be too. Use it at work and used it at my old house. Luckily I live near the exchange so I get around 22Mb. Also at work I am on the pro service and you get 2.5Mb upload which (i think) is more than any other ADSL or Cable service (at least in my area).

I also download quite a lot and I have never had an issue with traffic management as the service is supposed to be unlimited.

Just moved into a new house and they previously had Virgin so I thought what the hell and have just gone with them. So far my experience has been positive. They are not cheap but I am on the 50Mb connection which is about £35 just by itself. One concern is that they will implement traffic management sooner or later (on the 50MB lines) but I think I can work around it by keeping any large downloads for night-time.

 

Freeview. It's the way forward.

 

Ive had no probs with Sky but my bill comes in at £67 for phone, 8mb and HD with movies (no sport) which is pretty damn extorionate. I cant get half the freeview channels as I live in a really poor signal area and I hate BT so no BT vision for me

 

Sounds like our experiences with SkyHD, partly due to a crap installation (only one aerial works), but we've had constant problems, information will only be displayed on the current channel (want to know what episode of [tv show] that is? You have to change to the channel and hit 'i' first). It regularly can't pick up any schedules at all (solution: unplug the power).
This month it has decided that it no longer likes our viewing card so we're stuck with freeview, since this is the second time this has happened Sky are saying it's the boxes fault, which apparently isn't their problem (despite the box being ~6months old), but we should go direct to the installers (FutureTV in Bristol), guess who they say is responsible?
So we're stuck with a Sky+HD box that only does freeview, and sky still get paid.

Thank **** our internet is with Be* is all I can say.

 

Have to say that my experiences with Sky have been excellent. Came and installed it when agreed and have dealt with any problems swiftly. The best bit was being able to take my line rental over to them so I didn't have to use the god awful BT anymore.

 

that happened to me with my sky+, i had had it for 13 months. I found a letter you can write to mr Murdoch, within 3 days I had an engineer booked to come out and replace it. I have a copy of it i can send you if you pm me your email address.

 

Go with virgin dude, they rock
(sky really does suck, ive used both and virgin>sky )

 

Thankfully, I've not had much dealings with Sky customer service. The SkyHD box I've had to up the caps on the psu as the caps started leaking. It needs a power cycle now and again (I reckon it's with each update, it either powers on and freezes/becomes unresponsive after a few minutes or stays in standby). Broadband has been fine though. Went with 8MB at first, went to 16 (should be on 20 shortly, apparently). New viewing cards (on my third) have never caused problems. Because there was an existing dish, the engineer's visits (once for the original Sky box, then again to put a quad lnb on and and extra cable in for SkyHD) have never been any trouble. I don't think either checked the dish alignment though and the signal strength, whilst never becoming a problem, isn't high (I get higher signals on a 40cm camping setup).

 

Waited 6 months for our uncapped 16mb sky broadband to be put in, all the time while they were charging us the £10 a month for it. We had a BOOK to log all the telephone calls to various people in a faraway land. We went round and round in circles and then eventually spoke to a nice compassionate guy who just looked at it from there end and flicked a switch and poof! An 8Mb connection... Ah well can't complain. Although my friend has been hacking his neighbours 50Mb BrdBnd for over a month now. Naughty naughty

 

Do you guys still have to struggle with download limits? We went away with that evil years ago...

 

Update for you all, as promised.

Got home from work Tuesday, unplugged my own router, plugged the Sky one in, connected first time no problems at all, and also got the laptop up and running wirelessly with no problems at all.

Still in the 10 day training period, and first time connected at 3.5mb download speed. No big deal, at least it worked, but it was about half of what I had on the old 8mb service from Newnet.

Today it was still at 3.5mb, so as I have today off from work I thought I would face the nightmare of calling Sky and see if they would do anything to help.

I called them, the phone was answered in 3 rings by a very pleasant lady named Lisa. Obviously UK based, and working from Scotland judging by her slight accent. Result!!!

I explained the situation to her, fully expecting her to fob me off with the "give it 10 days" routine.

Couldn't have been more wrong. Not only did she say she would try and help, but that she would make adjustments to the line so I would see the internet lose connection while she was doing this. It might take her some minutes, so she offered to call me back once she had finished.

"Oh god, here we go again, with the callbacks, I will never hear from her again" I thought to myself. Inwardly sighing I thanked her and hung up, after all she did sound nice and helpful.

Less than 10 minutes later, the phone is ringing and it is Lisa, informing me she has made some changes and the internet should be back on now and for me to try a speedtest and see what happens, bearing in mind it is still in the 10 day training period, and speeds can go up a bit more.

I nearly fell over.

Your current bandwidth reading is:9.50 Mbps

which means you can download at 1.19 MB/sec. from our servers.


So, despite every single grain in my body dreading this switch over, so far Sky have delivered everything they said they would, I have phoned the tech support line and actually spoken to someone who was willing to help, and they made and kept a promised callback to me, with a very postive result.

Well done Sky. (and thankyou Lisa)

 

In all fairness, it was no fluke :-

9.55 Mbps - which means you can download at 1.19 MB/sec. from our servers.


Good night all from a very (so far) happy Sky broadband customer!

(Never thought the day would come when I said those words)

 

Speed Test Results
Date 24/09/09 23:28:35
Speed Down 12384.76 Kbps ( 12.1 Mbps )
Speed Up 858.90 Kbps ( 0.8 Mbps )
Port 8095
Server speedtest1.thinkbroadband.com

 

Given you had the install done by FutureTV, I'm guessing you live in a flat, as they do the rooftop dishes in most of the flats in Bristol (guess where I live?).

Sky are responsible for the set top box - I know this as my HD box was recalled and replaced by Sky.

FutureTV are responsible for the internal wiring to dish, as they installed that and set that up.

This may not help you sort it out but equally it may.

Going back closer to the main topic, used to live with my parents and had Sky, and Sky+ later on, for about 4 years. Was quite happy with the service and reliability. Generally every set top box I've had needed a reboot once a month or so.

Since moving to Bristol, I had Virgin V+ with cable modem (2 for £20 with a TV package upgrade and the £10 charge for V+) when V+ pretty much came out. I liked the fact you could record 2 and watch a third live program; with Sky+ or HD you can only record 2 and watch a recording. The internet was OK, stable enough. But V+ was a disappointment, generally being unstable and requiring a hard reset several times a week. And it was tucked in the back of a display stand, annoyingly.

I eventually bought an off-net flat, so went with SkyHD on a half price for 12 months deal. Which they cocked up, and after chasing them, I got a credit for 6 months of free service. Not quite the same thing, as I gotta pay full price for the other 6

To summarise: I've tried both and V+ is crap IMO. I'll stick with rebooting my SkyHD box once a month instead of several times a week for V+.

 

This is why I like Virgin Media. When we moved into the current flat and set up Virgin Media broadband, all they had to do was push a button at their end. I had the equipment the next day and was up and running straight away.

Haven't bothered with their TV package, as we don't watch much TV any more and we haven't bothered with a landline as we'd have no use for it.

I do have to power cycle the router every now and then, but that's because the supplied equipment is a pile of cack - I have plans to change that however, possibly using one of these little beauties: http://linitx.com/viewcategory.php?catid=180&pp=176,180

 

Well my experience with Sky wasn't that bad. A couple of little niggles: The guy doing the installation gave my mum attitude when having to wait 15mins for my dad to get back so he could talk o the guy. The crimp connectors he made for the phone are completely pants, they're almost falling off! I'm gonna have to redo it before they can use the pay per view.