[TV] Finally broken the SKY TV spell

[dazzer6666]

Brilliant yes i get minibox in bedroom so thats excellent .

Obviously you are good at this

Not really, just grabbed the deal on their website !
Also getting a free Xbox

 

[Cotton Socks]

We've got a friend in Eastbourne who a couple of weeks ago went over to BT. She is now negotiating to go back to Sky because the quality of the BT stuff was so poor, and their customer service is appalling.

A few years ago we decided to go over to BT. The quality of what they installed was so bad and their standard of customer service SO bad that we went immediately straight back to Sky. When we reported that the picture quality was horrendous, I fully expected them just to say they would get an engineer round to look at it - It was obvious that either something had been badly connected or the equipment was faulty. The Call Centre in India - and this is straight fact, not in ANY WAY intended to be racist - had my wife running up and down the stairs trying different solutions, none of which worked. We very soon told them we were cancelling the whole thing and going back to SKY.

I used to work in Customer Service many years ago, first of all for a Nationalised Industry - Gas - and then subsequently in two sellers of industrial equipment. If I or the people I was working for had treated any customer as we were treated, I would have expected to get a rocket.

It's the 1st time I've been able to get anything but VM where I live so being released from them was liberating! I did actually have a few problems concerning separating a sports pass I bought in lockdown & getting the Xbox sub trial for Jnr & a working landline, actually upon reflection it was a bloody nightmare. Customer Services were good & uk based but it did take probably over 6 hours in call time to get it sorted via different depts & I did say to someone 'don't be such a bloody tw@t' in the end as he was reading from a script & not listening to what I was saying. I did apologise loads to him & to the person that I spoke to after explaining that I call my friends tw@ts & it wasn't meant to be offensive.
On the plus side I don't have a moaning Jnr about Xbox lag as someone on VM accidentally let it slip that my speed was being throttled due to Jnr's excessive play (one game is apparently historically accurate & fits in with the History GCSE but I just cut off the wifi & make him use old fashioned revision guides). The connection is very stable, I'm not getting dropouts, I have no Jnr moaning & best of all no one has called my landline for months as I don't even know my new number myself! Oh and it was half the price of VM for more. I don't actually get TV from any of them I use Freesat & if you have a sat dish I can't see why the cable wouldn't go directly into the tv, the dish may need a 'nudge' to pick up the correct satellites, so this is probably the most useless post ever but a great advert for BT (not)??

 

[phoenix]

It's the 1st time I've been able to get anything but VM where I live so being released from them was liberating! I did actually have a few problems concerning separating a sports pass I bought in lockdown & getting the Xbox sub trial for Jnr & a working landline, actually upon reflection it was a bloody nightmare. Customer Services were good & uk based but it did take probably over 6 hours in call time to get it sorted via different depts & I did say to someone 'don't be such a bloody tw@t' in the end as he was reading from a script & not listening to what I was saying. I did apologise loads to him & to the person that I spoke to after explaining that I call my friends tw@ts & it wasn't meant to be offensive.
On the plus side I don't have a moaning Jnr about Xbox lag as someone on VM accidentally let it slip that my speed was being throttled due to Jnr's excessive play (one game is apparently historically accurate & fits in with the History GCSE but I just cut off the wifi & make him use old fashioned revision guides). The connection is very stable, I'm not getting dropouts, I have no Jnr moaning & best of all no one has called my landline for months as I don't even know my new number myself! Oh and it was half the price of VM for more. I don't actually get TV from any of them I use Freesat & if you have a sat dish I can't see why the cable wouldn't go directly into the tv, the dish may need a 'nudge' to pick up the correct satellites, so this is probably the most useless post ever but a great advert for BT (not)??

Yes i know what you mean reading from a script , me : I don't mind as long as i get sky and bt sports ,1 minute later do you like sports very frustrating happened several times. Don't get throttled at all i thought that was a thing of the past.

 

[Cotton Socks]

Yes i know what you mean reading from a script , me : I don't mind as long as i get sky and bt sports ,1 minute later do you like sports very frustrating happened several times. Don't get throttled at all i thought that was a thing of the past.

I thought throttling was a thing of the past as well until I started trying to barter with VM. He didn't mean to say it, but when I was questioning the reliability of VM we had at the time, he looked at our usage and said it was probably because of the excessive xbox usage. I then went and read the T&C's of VM (coz I'm sad) & saw they could restrict bandwidth (14 years ago they said they didn't & I carried on with that assumption) When I switched to BT, I downloaded all 'live chat' conversations when I signed up, where I repeatedly asked them if they have a 'fair usage' policy that meant speeds would be cut & they said they don't have the policy. I do speedtests just out of principle now! I thought that I could reduce the price, get an upgrade & a new router from VM but it turned out they wouldn't reduce my price to less than BT & they mentioned that they were restricting bandwidth at times anyway.

 

[Bold Seagull]

Tapping your knowledge, does it matter where the router is?

Our long term ISP is Zen, very pleased with them. Like most non-Virgin arrangements their router simply plugs in to the hardware shown above. So about a metre from the front of the house in our lounge, and a long way through thick 1941 solid walls to the rest of the house. The BT cabling into that box has been here an age.

I’ve read sometimes that folk relocate their router to centre of a home.

Not sure by what form of cabling to the BT plate?

Last question, do some people get BT to upgrade the external cabling into the house?

Basically yes it does because the wifi signal comes out of your router in all directions and degrades in effectiveness with distance and stuff it needs to pass through. That said, if you are happy with your signal at the furthest point from the router, and your broadband is performing well for you, then there is nothing to worry about.

In terms of cabling, depends on the service, if you are on 100mb/s or under, then standard cat5 100 base T cabling, switches etc. will be fine. It's only if you were on a service above 100mb/s that you would want to ensure that cables etc. were 1000 base T (1gb) so that you would benefit from the extra capacity on your network.

The point I was trying to make was, say you had poor wifi in one of your rooms, someone on their Xbox is screaming "why is our broadband so rubbish my game keeps lagging" - the sales pitch of 'we can upgrade you to 1gb which will resolve that' is generally just that - a sales pitch, because the resolution to that problem is with the router and wifi rather than the capacity in most cases.

In my case I bought a set of TP-Link Deco mesh wifi routers and placed them around the house, plus hardwired as much as I could such as TVs. You can now get Cat6 1gb cabling that is flat that can be put under carpet, pushed under skirting board gaps etc. The home network is always mine, if I change provider I don't need to change any network passwords or settings, their router is just put into modem mode and plugs straight into the existing network which remains the same.

I have no idea if people get BT to upgrade their cabling, but if you were paying for say 200mb/s, and only getting 100mb/s, then it may well be the cabling somewhere which is limited to 100mb/s.

 

[trueblue]

Surely you can just use any old sky box to get freesat. They're cheap as chips once people have upgraded. In fact most people give away their old ones.

From memory, I think with Sky Q boxes you need a different 'transponder' fitted or something like that.

 

[Bold Seagull]

I thought throttling was a thing of the past as well until I started trying to barter with VM. He didn't mean to say it, but when I was questioning the reliability of VM we had at the time, he looked at our usage and said it was probably because of the excessive xbox usage. I then went and read the T&C's of VM (coz I'm sad) & saw they could restrict bandwidth (14 years ago they said they didn't & I carried on with that assumption) When I switched to BT, I downloaded all 'live chat' conversations when I signed up, where I repeatedly asked them if they have a 'fair usage' policy that meant speeds would be cut & they said they don't have the policy. I do speedtests just out of principle now! I thought that I could reduce the price, get an upgrade & a new router from VM but it turned out they wouldn't reduce my price to less than BT & they mentioned that they were restricting bandwidth at times anyway.

I don't think this is a case of VM looking at Cotton Socks's usage and saying, lets restrict them a bit, this is a case of each junction box on their network, generally the green thing on the street corner having a set capacity both in terms of the properties it serves, plus the network capacity of the junction boxes it is also part of. The restriction comes if say on a Saturday night the connections from your junction box are all watching 4k films, and all the kids are gaming, then the box doesn't have the capacity to give everyone the speed they have paid for. The rest of the time it's absolutely fine, but at peak moments they may well have to restrict the use. I don't think it is anything to do with any personal use, and they are right, all the providers would need to do it if peak demand outstripped their capacity on that part of the network.

 

[Thunder Bolt]

Fibre isn't available in my area just yet, so we have an old Sky box, broadband via NowTV at 38mbps for £22 a month, inc landline, Amazon Prime, and a Now tv package for £20. The television is a smart tv.

 

[Rambo]

From memory, I think with Sky Q boxes you need a different 'transponder' fitted or something like that.

Correct

 

[boik]

Correct

Ah, OK. But Sky HD boxes definitely work and they are plentiful.

 

[Rambo]

Ah, OK. But Sky HD boxes definitely work and they are plentiful.

They do as long as you dont have a Sky Q LNB on your dish.

 

[Weststander]

Basically yes it does because the wifi signal comes out of your router in all directions and degrades in effectiveness with distance and stuff it needs to pass through. That said, if you are happy with your signal at the furthest point from the router, and your broadband is performing well for you, then there is nothing to worry about.

In terms of cabling, depends on the service, if you are on 100mb/s or under, then standard cat5 100 base T cabling, switches etc. will be fine. It's only if you were on a service above 100mb/s that you would want to ensure that cables etc. were 1000 base T (1gb) so that you would benefit from the extra capacity on your network.

The point I was trying to make was, say you had poor wifi in one of your rooms, someone on their Xbox is screaming "why is our broadband so rubbish my game keeps lagging" - the sales pitch of 'we can upgrade you to 1gb which will resolve that' is generally just that - a sales pitch, because the resolution to that problem is with the router and wifi rather than the capacity in most cases.

In my case I bought a set of TP-Link Deco mesh wifi routers and placed them around the house, plus hardwired as much as I could such as TVs. You can now get Cat6 1gb cabling that is flat that can be put under carpet, pushed under skirting board gaps etc. The home network is always mine, if I change provider I don't need to change any network passwords or settings, their router is just put into modem mode and plugs straight into the existing network which remains the same.

I have no idea if people get BT to upgrade their cabling, but if you were paying for say 200mb/s, and only getting 100mb/s, then it may well be the cabling somewhere which is limited to 100mb/s.

Thanks.

On thing I will be doing in a coming lounge refurb, is to link a new TV by a hidden ethernet cable to the router.

Our 10 / 15 year flat screen TV hasn't got that socket. The only modern thing about it is an Amazon firestick plugged into an hdmi socket.

I'll want to change TV anyway.