Thank you movie!

It wasn't that difficult to find was it!

afaik Sky want you to use their router and their router only to:

1) be able to support it by their staff

2) VOD etc coming soon

I understand some people are more internet savvy / technical and personnally do not care if you use your own or theirs. But it is part of their T and C's.

Also, keep in mind Sky have a track record of enforcing this. Look at the telephone connection requirement for the first 12 months of a sky contract. The use of the sky box is arguably even more important to the long term strategy of bskyb, so I'd guess they may start checking if people are using the router (remotely, obviously) and send out nasty letters if they don't.

I suppose though it's only going to be a very small fraction of people not using the sky box, just the technically savvy.

Well, the only way I see Sky actually being able to detect whether customers are using the supplied box is by reading the MAC address of the ADSL modem on the router (unless there are other ways, but my network is fully locked down to inbound connections); most ADSL routers now-a-days provide a MAC spoofing field to show whatever MAC address the user wants; i guess there's always a way if people are determined.

One thing that I did notice on movie's post is clause 3c, where it mentions the router software is updated automatically; is that why the default setup allowed the router to respond to pings; I've unchecked this option in the WAN setup so that the router doesn't respond to pings, would that make a difference in the automatic updates, and have Sky sent any updates?

(sorry if this sounds like a stupid question :-D )!

Fred.

afaik

Sky have not sent any updates

I would imagine there is one on its way to help sort the UPnP problem, which some people may or not have.

I would also imagine that the Netgear router that is used at the moment will be replaced for a better more robust (and works better) in the not to distant future.

Sky have not decided to give free / cheap broadband for them to look good, they have done it to make money. If your router (if not the Sky one) is not capable of what Sky have planned for the future, you are stopping them from making more money from anything you may buy on demand.

There are a lot of exciting things happening and you will soon see, that Sky BB is the one that everyone wants. All they need to do is sort their customer care / communication out and they are over half way there.

In reply to:

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I would also imagine that the Netgear router that is used at the moment will be replaced for a better more robust (and works better) in the not to distant future.

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Well I think the point I have been trying to make, albeit quite subtlety, is that it *could* be the firmware on the Netgear that is rubbish, rather than the actual hardware.

If that is the case then surely keeping your box connected, and getting the update may help.

I also think that not reporting the problem and just replacing the Sky router with your own doesn't give Sky the full size of the problem.

Numbers always matter.

I think an update to the firmware is on the cards, nudge nudge wink wink

Sounds like you know something we don't :-)

Lets just say, watch this space, I am sure there will be more routers from Sky before long that are not Netgear

That could be interesting, if they decide to start sending out other routers too.

Mind you if they are being run by the same people who run UKOnline, at first they enforced their router on anyone taking the 8Mbps service, but they have dropped that now.

hmmmm it'll certainly be interesting to see what they do.