Setting up Sky – do I need a landline for it to work?

I am currently with Virgin but the renewal cost seems a bit on the steep side (even after a threat to leave) so I am looking at Sky as an option as their deals seem very good.

I am currently on a fibre connection straight to the house so just have the single cable coming into the house which goes into the router, with an output from there to the house phone (which we barely use, but want to keep as a back-up). The original telephone line to the house terminates in a small box just outside the house (some distance from where the tv is set up).

If I swap to Sky do they need to access the phone line to manage the services or is it all done via the satellite dish these days (which I have installed, but it hasn’t been used for several years).

There’s no back channel via the satellite dish so you need some sort of “land” connection. It used to be that this was via your phone line but newer boxes will use your broadband router.

You’ll need a landline for broadband and phone. The fibre to your house is part of the Virgin network, other providers can’t use it. The best you can probably hope for is fibre to cabinet and copper cable to the house. That said we’re with Sky, rang them to complain about speeds (5 meg upload) and drop out. They signed us up to a new contract, dropped the broadband cost by £8 per month, sent us a new router and arranged for an openreach engineer to come out next day (free). The engineer replaced our original master socket and got 40 meg, I clocked it at 20 meg on WiFi. Changed over to the new router and am now getting 30 meg over WiFi. Real test will be tonight when everyone is on but I have to say I’m gob smacked with the response and improvement from Sky after one phone call.

The FiL just got Sky installed at his place and he has no landline or broadband. All done through the dish.

@gobuchul. Your FiL will receive his TV through the dish but there’s no return channel through it. As of September 2019 and presumably still, Sky Internet is provided over BT OpenReach.

Sky used to require the landline (I think the contract stated it had to be connected for the first 12 months) because PPV details were stored on the smartcard in the STB and they needed the link to be able to charge for what you’d watched – there was a claim going round that you could get movies, etc “for free” if you disconnected the landline but all that really happened was that you used up your credit on the card and at some point you couldn’t watch any more movies. If anyone plugged in the landline then the card and Sky immediately communicated and you got billed!

Since Sky have obviously installed their kit it’s unlikely that they do this now and you/your FiL will be billed as and when you watch an event.

Sky used to require the landline (I think the contract stated it had to be connected for the first 12 months)

Back when I first signed up like 10 years ago this was exactly the case. I think it was used for usage stats or some such too. As soon as the 12 months were up I unplugged it and it’s never been connected since.

Whether it’s still the same or not I don’t know for sure, but I’d be astonished if they hadn’t moved any dial-home requirements over onto the broadband router by now.

Dunno about the usage stats – Sky use a software stack called OpenTv, the industry joke is that it’s anything but open. Twenty years ago I did the STB side code for usage on what were then NTL and Telewest cable boxes which are now Virgin Media. About ten years ago I did the same for an STB built for German cable.

I was told a couple of years ago that Virgin collect about 3Gb of data per night from the boxes connected to their network. It’s not all user behaviour, there’s monitoring of the various parts of the network as well. The system could also transmit commands so in theory the call centre could ask the customer to put the Box on to channel 101, ie. BBC1, and then run a script which could change channel, adjust volume or whatever. I demonstrated it but never found out if it ever got taken up as I left that company not long after.