Looking to reduce household bills and as a sky tv subscriber i can get a good deal on the broadband and phone package.

The service used to have a poor reputation, anyone currently using who can comment on this? Is it suitable?

Was ok for me. No obvious traffic shaping. Only gripe is the fact you have to use the router they supply or your in breach of their T&Cs. I believe you could use your own but they won’t provide you with certain bits of necessary info, though it should be available on line. Their own router is crap and your very limited in what you can access and change.

It depends on how many people in your area have BB via a phone line. Day time surfing will be fine but once the rush hour starts it’ll be poop.

HTH

@boardinbob – what would you access and change like ?
i have asked them for a new N1 [???] rated router and they said theyd send me A NEW ONE TOP TRY F.O.C.

mines not very good, and the router isnt very powerful compared to my old BT homehub, doesnt seem to have as much range.

My folks have Sky….. average speed around 200k for some unknown reason. They were 2.5M with BT previously so watch out

Mines been fantastic for the last 2+ years we have had it – pay for 16meg, average 14meg – even in ‘peak’ times – live in a city centre flat though – but all flats have sky tv access for likely that sky BB might be used by others locally.

Had an unbelievably bad experience with them. Customer service/tech support was beyond useless.

Before choosing a provider, use samknows.co.uk to work out what’s available, and go for an LLB service. Sky might be fine if they’re unbundled, but if not you could get extremely poor speeds.

the_lecht_rocks – Member

@boardinbob – what would you access and change like ?

NAT type was set to strict which was a hassle on xbox live and there was no way to go into the router and assign a static IP address to the xbox then put that in the DMZ.

Had it for the last couple of months and speed wise it’s been great. Customer service were dreadful (colleagues who have dealt with Virgin, BT etc say much the same thing) but if you stamp your feet a bit and get escalated you’ll be put through to someone helpful. Also like BoardinBob says the NAT restriction thing is annoying for online gaming.
Overall i’m happy with them.

Contemplating the same at the moment but a bit wary as I currently have an excellent ISP but it does cost me.

I moved to 02 from Sky despite having no real problems with Sky, but I was lured by a hefty cashback deal. I could swap provider again for more cashback but I’m happy to stick with O2. £10 a month as I’m an existing mobile customer and their customer service is excellent i.e. I get regular texts and emails in advance of any known problems with my service (which are rare). Also noticeably faster than my previous Sky speed. Max with Sky, from the same exchange on an LLU line, was about 6 meg. I consistently achieve 10 meg with O2.

Got Sky broadband in October(no TV, so £5 surcharge), quite happy with it. Router they supply is OK actually (D Link based), it is a pain that you dont get the username and password to allow you use your own routers, but there are easy ways around that… 😉
If you go to http://www.samknows.co.uk and check on available broadband, see if Sky LLU is listed, otherwise you’ll be put on a BT based ADSL max package, which tends to be heavily traffic shaped at peak times.
People seem to think that wireless speed is down to the DSL service, it isn’t its the router.

We went from the BT home hub (the white one, which needed re-booting every now and again) to Sky, been with them for 2 years now & not lost a connection yet!

But BT Infinity is due in March here with us, so might switch back again 😉

To add detail to my above declared hatred of sky BB, I was told I’d get up to 8Meg but routinely got only 0.2Meg (that was Sky via BT ADSL max).

Switched to TalkTalk LLU and now get 15-18Meg. Granted, the first router I got was shonky but they sent me a new, better one after a prompt and knowledgeable technical discussion. Zero issues since.

Speeds do depend completely on your own exchange, but my experience with sky’s customer services would be had by anyone.

reason not to go with sky no.1

Agree about Murdoch, hateful little pustule.
But their prices are good and so is their service.

No problems with them what so ever in the 5 years or so we’ve had them, reliably fast where I live.

Parents Sky BB is awful. They are on the ‘Connect’ package as Sky don’t supply to their area so it’s basically a watered down, basic package with every possible limitation. Crap router drops signal all the time (but they don’t notice as it’s plugged into the PC). The connection cuts off for no apparent reason for about 2 minutes at a time, many times a day – making large file downloads difficult. 5GB download allowance or something ridiculous. Youtube struggles to buffer on standard def. AVOID if you can only get ‘Connect’ in your area.

Connection dropping is rarely the router, usually line issues or on site interference.
Do they have crackling or noise on their phone line?

bigyinn,

very interesting what you say there, my parents have the sort of problem Oggles mentions, and yes they sometimes do have a crackly line. What would your advice be? to have the line checked?

I have replaced the Linksys router they were using with a Netgear one and the connection has not dropped yet so it seems to be less sensitive to whatever the problem is.

Some routers can be more sensitive than others. Noise on the line will generally have a negative impact on the stability of the DSL. If its more crackly during wet conditions, waters getting into the line somewhere. Trouble is, line tests rarely pick up any issues on crackly lines, so its best to test from the master socket, behind the front plate, and try another phone in the line too.

Sky was atrocious for us – relatively rural location so on their ‘connect’ service or whatever it was called. Utterly useless; traffic was ‘shaped’ to the nth degree – this effectively made iPlayer / 4od unusable between the hours of about 10am and 11pm. I also work from home some days and they throttle ssh connections to about 2kbps, presumably on the assumption that if you’re doing something encrypted then it must be illegal downloading. I could get around this by using a VPN but their general shaping in peak times again made any sort of connection to work impossible for about 8 hours of the working day.

Wouldn’t touch them again if you paid me. Their technical ‘support’ seemed to consist of people reading from scripts that they weren’t allowed to deviate from. Trying to speak to someone with a modicum of IT networking knowledge was impossible and incredibly frustrating.

My parents live near their exchange in a supposedly decent area and whilst I’m not sure what bundle they’re on, again we can’t Skype chat with them / they can’t use iplayer etc in peak times which is irritating in the extreme – again apparently due to shaping…

Not cheap but I’d recommend either Zen who I’ve used before, or Namesco, who I’m using currently. I pay extra for better contention ratios etc and a 60GB limit and it’s worth every penny.