From today you cannot order Broadband without line rental

I literally got my MAC code two days ago, checked the Sky website and it was possible to order SKy Broadband on its own, £12.50 per month and gets me Anytime Plus on my HD box.

From today the website has been changed and I could not order Broadband without taking their line rental. I phoned up their sales line and was told that from 1st September it is no longer possible to order Broadband without taking Sky Talk line rental.

I don't recall having seen this anywhere, so I guess it was not an announced change. Pretty annoyed to be honest, I don't think this is a clever move at all.

In reply to a post by Millsey:

I literally got my MAC code two days ago, checked the Sky website and it was possible to order SKy Broadband on its own, £12.50 per month and gets me Anytime Plus on my HD box.

From today the website has been changed and I could not order Broadband without taking their line rental. I phoned up their sales line and was told that from 1st September it is no longer possible to order Broadband without taking Sky Talk line rental.

I don't recall having seen this anywhere, so I guess it was not an announced change. Pretty annoyed to be honest, I don't think this is a clever move at all.

well they do have some form for not being forth coming with mac codes , so i suppose this move (FULL LLU ) only gets them out of providing mac's altogether, couple that with their support staff who are either clueless or are unable to help customers due to the restrictions placed on them by their company

I think I saw a SKY advert in last weekend's papers, packaging a Broadband price with their line rental - probably the mandatory line rental bit was in the infinitely microscopic small print immediately below the advert

i noticed.
A friend of mine was going to go to Sky broadband, we went into the process and then it put line rental in the basket. When we took the line rental out, she was told she could not have broadband.


for s atrt she is in a contract with a phone company and she is happy with the service and second she don't like the idea of being fully unbundled.

so what Sky have done is lost a customer, i would have thought that the way things are Sky would be happy to have someone just on broadband than not at all, but they must have enough customer after all they seem to be giving people less choice.

the other thing is now my friend is considering whether to bother with the internet at all now as she thinks it is all to much hassle and not worth the bother.


Also, if I have to move suppliers for any reason, sky would have been my first choice, but now they are not a choice at all, I will not go fully unbundled,


So well done Sky.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Also, if I have to move suppliers for any reason, sky would have been my first choice, but now they are not a choice at all, I will not go fully unbundled,

I tend to think like that myself. However it is widely accepted that LLU broadband is better than BT Wholesale broadband in many cases, and Sky's move means that two of the three major LLU providers will only take on customers who are prepared to go fully unbundled.

The question is, if the exchange only has Sky and TalkTalk LLU, is it worth keeping the broadband on BT Wholesale just for the sake of keeping the phone on BT Wholesale too?

It could be used as a way of keeping customers, the migration process for full llu'd customers needs to be simplified and quicker, up to 2 weeks without a working land line is just not acceptable, changes need to be made if they want to only offer full llu

My phone has never left BT Wholesale. However a friend of mine moved from Sky LLU phone to TalkTalk LLU phone with just a few minutes of downtime. The only problem he had was that TalkTalk hadn't set up caller display properly but it was fixed in a few days.

But when the process goes wrong, it goes badly wrong, and I've previously said a PAC/MAC style migration system for landlines should exist.

I fail to see how this is any worse than BT Retail insisting on you having line rental with them, in order to take BT Broadband.

Why do people have a problem with going fully unbundled, i've got my internet from sky and my telephone from them and cant really complain, so what is the big issue with doing this, or am i missing something?.

I think the bigger problem is going from full LLU to partial LLU. If you try and go from full LLU to BT line rental and a separate ISP (whether LLU or BT Wholesale based) then you generally have to get the phone line back to BT before you can place any order on it. And then if something goes wrong you may lose your phone number in the process.

And that is why I don't have full LLU with Sky. But, this move may mean that once my 12 months is up I will move back away from Sky - only went to them for Anytime + as a punt and now know that Anytime + gives very little that I actually want. Sky will likely lose a customer they already have through this as I don't want to run this risk.