My parents have a Sky bundle, mainly because my Dad couldn't live without the sports channels and his beloved NASCAR. They currently offer one of the best basic broadband, home phone and digital TV bundles. This includes:
• Unlimited evening and weekend calls • A free wireless router • 2Mbps connections speed • 2GB download limit • Choice of any 2 Sky ‘mixes’
Sky ‘mixes’ are TV packs that consist of various channels of a certain genre, for example, if you’re interested in movies and culture, you could choose the ‘Variety’ and ‘Style & Culture’ mixes, which would give you, among others, channels Sky One, Bravo, Living, UKTV Style, UKTV Food and Discovery Real Time, as well as all the basic Freeview channels such as BBC, ITV and Film4.
However, if you want to add extras to your package, such as Sky’s film channels, on top of free calls anytime of the day, you could be looking at an overall cost of about £35 a month.
The broadband itself is reliable, and has had good reviews. And Sky were also recently crowned our Custer Service kings. Check this out:
I have had Sky Broadband for 2 years now and - apart from a few early teething troubles caused by the massive demand when it was first launched - have found it to be stable, reliable and excellent value. The Sky Customer Services facility is not particularly responsive or helpful unless you are persistent, but there is a good Skyuser forum available that I find resolves most technical queries very well ( see the site at http://www.skyuser.co.uk/forum/ )
I would caution any potential user to think through what exactly they want, though, as I found I was unnecessarily paying for the Max package (at £10 per month) for a year before I switched to the Mid package at £5 per month. Max is really only needed if you live VERY close to the exchange (to make use of the 16Mbps Max speed) or download a very high quantity of material. Otherwise I would recommend signing up for the Mid package, which gives a maximum speed of 8Mbps and a download limit of 50GB per month - more than enough for the average user. The free basic package is, in my view, too restricted for most users, with its lower speed and download limits.
Keeping within the download limit is easy to achieve using the excellent Broadband Download Monitor available elsewhere on this site.
My phone line is limited to 2mbps so I can't have midi. I'm with AOL at present and AOL Talk which total £17.48 permonth but they have just introduced the same for £12.99 so I will be querying that one! I would really like Sky as their Free To Air leaves out all the programmes I watch but I'll keep searching in the hope that I'll find a reasonable bundle.
i am with sky for phone and broadband and i am not happy with it one bit. first of all when i moved it took them 3 weeks to reconnect my internet and they charged me for the time i wasnt connected! second of all i have had problems with my router even with the ethernet cable i was getting a rubbish reception. they "lovely" spotty geaky teenager i keep getting put through to kept on saying it was my wireless card or it was my ethernet cable or it was even my computer wasnt compatable! I changed everything on my laptop and it still doesnt work even though a friend of mine has sky broadband with the same router as mine and i can connect to it perfectly. sky are still saying it is my laptop thats the problem. believe me when i say in 4 months when my contract expires i will be changing providers.
the tv was fine, but u will find that sky does charge 5.49 for the first 6 months of talk unlimited then after the period has gone it goes up to about 11 pound sumfing.
I've been with Sky for years so decided to try the broadband. No problems with the service but because of the distance I only average approx 3.5MB on the Mid package (£5), I was warned of this speed when I signed up 6 months ago. I've just received a 'blackmail' letter informing me that unless I take up the Sky Talk they are increasing the subscription by 100%. I already have free evening & weekend calls with BT and BT's 08 numbers are cheaper than Sky talk. Needless to say I have complained and I'm awaiting their response.
Sky Broadband
Posted - 27/05/2008 : 16:29:33
