All I can say is that their customer services is 1000000% better than BT.

Rather than hanging on ringtone for ages, then getting booted at 20:00 when the "Service" (sic) Centre closes, or getting the run around across 10 different numbers, you get through to someone who a) knows what they're doing and b) can keep kicking BT Openreach until the fault is fixed.

I had an intermittently noisy line. Despite it remaining noisy when a single phone was plugged into the test socket in the NTE, the fault stubbornly refused to appear when the BT tech came round, and they kept trying to blame the adjacent equipment (yeah, right). One tech blatantly lied as he said he'd check the street cab, and when the fault finally appeared when a decent tech was on site, he said the connector on my pair in the cab was a lovely shade of green - and the cab was marked up for a full rebuild sometime. Took him all afternoon to swap to a new pair back to the exchange.

Without Sky Talk's willingless to repeatedly re-raise a ticket on the fault (mostly coz they heard the noise when i called them) I doubt the fault would have been fixed. I also doubt I'd ever have managed to call the fault in if I was still on BT.

Of course, the (Sky) broadband died at the same time, but I knew it would be easier to report a voice fault as it was clearly a dodgy pair.

So I'd thoroughly recommend going Sky Talk for the line rental. I only use the line for 01/02/03 evenings and weekends, rest of the time calls go by VoIP, so the call charges don't matter a fig to me.

Virgin Media got a big oh-no for neither supporting, nor having any plans to support, caller ID presentation.

Well I'm on Sky talk for the 2ed time Sky plus TV and Sky BB and so far all 3 are excellent time will tell ?

PS : 7.15mb downloads on a 8096 connection unbelievable when Zen synced at 5mb & downloaded at 2mb at night as did pipex Sky BB now 2 years and some.....

PPS : & No I'm not a Sky fan boy quite the opposite

Edited by deleted (Fri 21-Nov-08 14:20:08)

In reply to:

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18185 still works on sky talk but with 1280 gone confidence is shattered as some people think its only a matter of time before its blocked. Ofcom have been contacted by dozens of people regarding the sky talk shambles and are playing dumb at the moment.

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JOOI Is it only on the SKY Talk Rental lines that 1280 has gone or is it on all SKY talk packages, because I thought that on the (i forget the correct title) use other operators service that they had to keep access to 1280 so that you could still route via the Line Rental companies service, they may be breaking conditions here if not.

if you pay line rental to sky as I understand it 1280 and 18185 would always be blocked.

previously on just paying for outgoing calls 1280 and 18185 (plus other providers) worked.

Now 1280 is blocked but 18185 still works.

The reason for this is sky are using a new wholesale product for their sky talk CPS product, this new wholesale product doesnt utilise 1280 overide back to BT, so far the only reasons I have heard from this is that BT indicating complaints regarding confusion of where calls are billed and apperently some people got billed on both CPS and BT. Sky havent given an explanation at all tho as to why they changed to the new wholesale product. My guess is tho they had too many customers bypassing sky talk for their expensive 0845/0870 calls.

Thanks for that, and reminding me it was called CPS, I'm getting old and the memory cells are deteriorating :-)

PS I think all their call charges are expensive if you include the 7p connection charge for each call, I used to use OneTel until they got taken over by TalkTalk and they did away with the calls only accounts. Any calls I made between my mobile and home and vv were free. They tried to get me to sign up for their line rental product, but couldn't provide me with Distinctive Ring, or allow me to keep the free calls package.

Tend to use 18866 for any long calls nowadays

Edited by The_Voyager (Mon 24-Nov-08 10:55:09)

The answer is to avoid ringing 0870 or other premium numbers. I always use http://www.saynoto0870.com/ as a first reference before making any premium rate calls, and am seldom at a loss for a standard landline number. I have Sky Talk for £5 a month and it has saved me loads, apart from my broadband savings.