My Sky+ and sky broadband install experience
// September 13th, 2008 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
Ok so first real post. I just got sky+, I had a look around for some details before taking the jump and didn’t find a great deal so thought I would share my experience.
First of all customer service and the installers were all great so kudos there.
DECT Phone extender – didn’t work for me
I tried to use a wireless DECT phone extender since I didn’t want to run a phone cable down the stairs (sky would do it but they only tack the wire too the skirting board, can’t lift carpets or go into lofts). I saw mixed reviews on the Internet as to them working or not. For me they didn’t. I went for this one from maplin, a one4all type one. Worked fine for voice but didn’t work in either data or voice mode for the sky box. The engineers said it should be fine at the start of the install so I assume they have seen them work before, but not in this case. For reference I have the amstrad PVR3.
Anyway the installers activated my card via the PDA rather than over the phoneline. It took around 4 hours for the card to be live but worked, the Sky+ functionality didn’t work at first but a quick call to sky support and they activated it again while I was on the phone and all worked well. Its interesting to note that they sky installers were not worried that it wasn’t connected to a phone – so if you get the right installers looks like you can get away without having it attached.
Of course no phone means no ordering box office from the remote, but that’s probably a good thing for my bill (and probably why sky insist you have it attached!).
Looks like I may need to attach the phoneline to activate the remote recording facility, going to try that later so will prob post an update.
UPDATE: I did need to attach the phoneline to enable remote record, but then disconnected it and it still works fine.
Broadband
I have moved from virgin cable to ASDL, mainly because I could get internet phone and TV for the same price from sky that I was just getting internet from virgin. Virgin tried to get me to stay but couldn’t match sky for the price (inc a free sky+ box vs £70 for their virgin+ box and a bigger subscription). They just send the ADSL modem out to you and you plug it in yourself. All worked fine, I’m getting about 6.2meg at top speed on the 8Mb service which I’m happy enough with. The router is nothing epic but does the job (its a rebadged netgear). The wireless coverage isn’t amazing due to an internal aerial but again does the job.
I don’t know if my speed would go up if I went to the 16meg service but for the moment I’m not too worried.
UPDATE: It is now topping out at about 6.8meg so don’t know if it needs some time to settle to a max speed.
