Moving phone and broadband to Sky

Hi,

Currently with BT for phone and IDNet for broadband.
Sky have just LLU enabled my exchange (here) so am considering moving the whole lot over to Sky.
I would like to keep my phone number.

Do this transfer usually go smoothly?
Will I have any downtime?

TIA,

Zebs

You will keep your number. The transfer sometimes has some downtime (think it was about 30 mins when I migrated). Everything went smoothly for me.

Sky broadband unlimited is great. No slowdowns, very good value for an unlimited connection. Can't really fault it.

Usually goes smoothly. I have moved a line from AOL to Sky, and a line from BT to sky and then to Sky fibre optic. No issues during any of these.

Also had the services moved when I moved household. Again fine.

Sky LLU has so much capacity / backhaul. Sky ADSL customers share backhaul with Sky fibre customers at each local exchange. I have Sky fibre 80Mbps and I get full speeds even at 6 - 9pm. If I can pull 80Mbps... It just shows how easily Sky can handle a 20Mbps connection via standard broadband.

It's the best provider I've ever had by a long shot. There is no traffic management, no throttling, no usage allowances, no fair usage policy, torrents go full speeds 24/7, no peak time slow downs. It just doesn't get much better than Sky right now in my honest opinion.

Customer services can take a good 5 - 30 minutes to get things resolved. On a plus side it's always someone who's English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh. Never foreign. No script monkeys. I've joked about my fav bevvies and other things to the call centre people.

Also if you go via cancellations they have some pretty sweet deals. I've been with Sky for a long time now and I have my line rental discounted to £1 a month for 12 months and due to some issues I had (which were resolved well) I also got half price TV for 6 months.

When my TV box packed up a few years ago they charged me £46 for the box but discounted my package to save me over £200 within 12 months to offset the cost.

Overall great. There are some bad eggs in the company but it would take something serious to make me switch.

What I love about Sky is that in any area where congestion becomes an issue, or there becomes a slowdown, Sky always install more backhaul and get things back to 100% 24/7. Other ISPs just leave the network to slowdown at peak hours. As soon as the sky network slows during peak hours, they sort it by upgrading the exchange's capacity.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Thu 25-Oct-12 04:18:00)

Should add, the router they provided me is the most stable thing I've ever owned. It's plugged in behind my fridge freezer and I don't think I've ever needed to manually switch it off and on.

I can't comment on their newest router (I don't have it) but I've never had an issue with Sky's routers. The wifi of this Sky router I've got beats my £120 Netgear dual band router hands down. Always a plus.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Thu 25-Oct-12 04:20:50)

All sounds great, thanks for the replies.

I take it you own the router that they give you?

I've never had ADSL 2, here are my stats for ADSL.
What sort of speeds might I get?

DSL Line (Wire Pair): Line 1 (inner pair)
Protocol: G.DMT
Downstream Rate: 8064 kbps
Upstream Rate: 448 kbps
Channel: Interleaved
Current Noise Margin: 16.0 dB (Downstream), 30.0 db (Upstream)
Current Attenuation: 17.0 dB (Downstream), 9.0 db (Upstream)
Current Output Power: 19.9 dB (Downstream), 10.1 db (Upstream)
DSLAM Vendor Information: Country: {0xB5} Vendor: {IFTN} Specific: {0xBE71}

Using http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/calc/calculator.php

18 to 20 Meg down and close to 1 Meg upload

Sky almost a year ago was upgrading to put 10GigE in place rather than just Gig fibre at many exchanges.

Thanks Andrew.
What connection speed should I enter on that page?
Put in 8000 and the traffic light at the bottom shows "red" - but I guess it will sync higher when its an ADSL2+ connection?

Red because one would normally expect 8128Kbps at your attenuation. So assuming no underlying reason for this then yes will sync higher once the extra frequencies of ADSL2+ come into play.