Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello people on the forumy thing. It's Mrs A here, I've hijacked Mali A's account as we are in a bit of a confusion over Sky. Basically we were wondering if getting a Sky package is worth it and how it all works re 'mixes' and stuff. Also is the broadband any good? At the moment we just have freeview, Plusnet broadband and the basic BT calls package (we have to pay 5p per hour). So am just trying to figure it out whether getting Sky would be worth it really.... well worth it to avoid the bloody Top Gear re-runs!

Any help from people who have Sky, or any knowledge about this sort of stuff, would be appreciated.

Many thanks Mrs A

ps Mali A is sat topless playing MK - I'm such a lucky woman aren't I.......

It IS worth getting Sky if they are active on your phone exchange. No question; the TV package is better and cheaper. Simple.

The broadband is free if they are on your exchange, and is configurable in terms of speed/download allocation (i.e. for a tenner a month, you get more.)

Unfortunately they are not on my exchage, so I stick with Namesco.

If you want the TV, you'd be mad not to get the broadband with it.

Tell them you don't know which mixes to choose, and ask for a one month trial of the lot. Sky gave my brother it for the price of the lowest package. It does seem to depend on who you get on the end of the phone though, so, as always, YMMV.

Standard channels are split into six themed groups, called "entertainment mixes". Each one has a number of channels in it. Each one costs £1 per month.

Then you can add on "premium mixes" i.e. movies and sport. These are optional.

Finally you can choose a standard sky box (don't do that), Sky+ (eye opening if you've never had a PVR before), or Sky HD (not great value for money but I'm happy with mine).

A reasonable full price breakdown is here and lists of what is in each channel mix is here.

If you want to sign up to the triple play i.e. broadband, TV, and home phone you get discounts. And do it through quidco too - I got £130 cashback when I took out SkyHD around Christmas. I've been very happy with it (SkyHD+6mixes+no movies or sport + phone + 16meg broadband).

I've had Sky with the £10 broadband package for about 6 months now (since I moved house) and it's absolutely great. No problems whatsoever. I'd wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.

Because we're miles from the exchange, I "only" get a 4 Mbit connection, but it's completely solid and so much faster and more reliable than the 20 Mbit connection from virgin media (*spit*) I used to have (that used to regularly top out at 5kb/sec, with massive latencies -- it was practically unusable towards the end).

Little bootnote to this. I'm on the Sky "up to 16 meg" package and I live less than 0.8 miles from my exchange. Last night a collection of torrents were fetching 49kB/sec up and 761 kB/sec down. I think that's pretty fast!

That's only about half of your 'up to' speed though chap.

My line syncs at about 12 meg or so -- I should have mentioned that. So it's half of my nominal line speed. However, it's still by a wide margin the fastest I've ever seen a home broadband go -- and I still had capacity, I could still browse and whatnot. This was also taking place at about 8pm too, so I'd expect it to go faster in the dead of night.

I'm on their max package (forget what that that is atm) and I often get 1400kB/sec down from torrents/usenet. I've limted my upload on torrents as I tend to slow my connection down if I don't.

Malc

Hmm. I think I'll turn the connection count up in uTorrent and see what more it can do then, and also check outside of peak time.