Thank you so much MrSaffron

When I first contacted the Post-Office, the assistant Steve told me about a code he could provide me with that I could then give to BE that would help to link the Line-order with the BE broadband order and could help to reduce or completely nullify any time between the Land-line being activated and the BE broadband being activated. - I wonder if this is the (LORN Number). Will phone tomorrow and find out.
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Firstly considering your information I think I might go ahead with this tomorrow by contacting the Post-Office and applying for a migration from Sky. Do you know if I will be able to keep my current phone line number, this is quite important to me, according to Steve this depended on Sky, and Sky said that in the case of a migration they would not withheld the original land-line number, but it was up to the post office to request it.

Secondly, the post office also stated there is no charge associated with getting the phone-line with them, except the quarterly payments of the service.

Thirdly, once I have contacted the Post-Office, should I then contact Sky. Or will the transfer happen automatically and then my Sky landline and broadband simply be terminated once the transfer has taken place?

PS:
Finally you seem a little against BE, recently I have had trouble hence the move, but compared with the problems I am getting with Sky, I would much rather be on BE. That being said, I am looking for an ISP with either Unlimited usage (or very high Data allowance +150GB), has relatively no throttling and is priced at around the 40Pound mark. (including line rental and a talk package).

Edited by deleted (Thu 10-May-12 21:27:33)

Make sure post office give you the lorn and know you want to keep the number, they will then request it to be ported from Sky

Once the phone line and broadband orders are under way then other than paying any final bills no more to do with Sky

Ok good thing I've seen this thread I'll avoid switching to Sky then.

I think with the recent issues O2 have had perhaps quite a few people may have switched to Sky. There are also lots of places in Canterbury that arn't getting FTTC. Where I live for one.

O2 had this problem in the early days, it took BT months to upgrade the wholesale fibre for O2's backhaul into Canterbury.

BT are rubbish, I know of a leased line order that is still ongoing after 1 year 1 month since being ordered.

One users issue shouldn't put you off joining sky. For most everything is fine. If you browse other ISP forums you'll probably find that sky have less complaints about speed than other ISPs.

The "joys" of Full LLU!

I have a very good work around for O2's ongoing routing issues ... I connect to my works VPN. I am not in any hurry to move away.

My initial reasoning for moving to Sky was for the following reasons:

1.) BE had had a pretty horrible few months between February and April. Everything from routing issues to unstable latency. However, in the week before my Sky went active I had a perfectly stable 11.5Mb/s Down and 1Mb/s Up connection with around 29ms. I even considered cancelling the Sky order at one point.

[Older BE speed-test]

Also I was concerned with BE taking quite long to roll out their new core network. There was very little information regarding it besides the emails we received in January.

2.) Sky's 6 months free broadband and talk is without a doubt a good selling point. Welcoming a price drop for my broadband and calls of over 25pounds was very easy.

3.) BE clearly don't have a clear road map for their fiber product. My idea was that if I moved over to Sky once my area in Canterbury (if ever) gets FTTC I can simply upgrade to it.

- -

However, with all this said. My current 5 reasons for leaving Sky are very simple:

1.) Absolutely terrible peak time latency and speed drops.

2.) Some of the worst technical support and most confusing cancelation departments I have ever dealt with. Their solution to everything is: Restart the router, and it's your equipments fault. Until I got a senior tech support assistant they could not understand what Latency or a Trace-route was and what they indicated. Also their cancelation department gave me different information every-time I call. Don't get me started on the forum support members.

3.) They don't appear to take my complaints seriously. For instance explaining that this peak time problem is being caused by an internal Core Sky Router (See trace-route), was simply ignored and not understood.

4.) My Sky sync rates are about 2Mb/s (Down) slower and about 0.5Mb/s (Up) slower than my BE connection.

5.) I don't honesty feel comfortable being on an ISP that is so difficult to migrate away from:
Comparing my experience moving from BE to Sky than Sky to another ISP.

On a last note on the Sky forums there a quite a number of users with extremely similar problems to mine. From around 8pm to 12:30pm speeds drop down significantly and latency sky rockets. Some of these members are not in Canterbury but 2 of them were. However, everyone on the forums with this problem is posting trace routes, where the 3rd Hope which is a 10.x.x.x internal IP between Sky and Easynet is suddenly giving ping times of +250ms during peak hours.
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Please don't get me wrong there are many people with Sky who are getting a great working service. However, I am not one of them and to be honest I don't see this problem being solved very soon, especially not with the way Sky have treated my complaint.

Neither am I saying that BE is the best ISP, but they were much better than what I am currently getting. However, I would like to hear from anyone who would like to sugest an alternative ISP I was considering IDnet, but to be honest don't know much about them.

Edited by deleted (Thu 10-May-12 23:51:35)

In reply to a post by Fugitive_Legacy:

Also the Canterbury exchange was supposedly fixed at the end of April after suffering intermittent connection problems including slow browsing and high latency. But I don't know if 300ms is fixed?

You'll probably find the fix date has slipped if you bung your postcode in the status check page :- http://servicestatus.sky.com/serviceupdates

In reply to a post by Fugitive_Legacy:

PS:
Finally you seem a little against BE, recently I have had trouble hence the move, but compared with the problems I am getting with Sky, I would much rather be on BE. That being said, I am looking for an ISP with either Unlimited usage (or very high Data allowance +150GB), has relatively no throttling and is priced at around the 40Pound mark. (including line rental and a talk package).

BT? They only throttle P2P, and have totally unlimited usage too. Course, I've seen the P2P throttling vary between super-heavy and none at all, but they don't throttle anything else (officially).

In reply to a post by Kr1s69:

One users issue shouldn't put you off joining sky. For most everything is fine. If you browse other ISP forums you'll probably find that sky have less complaints about speed than other ISPs.

Yes but most aren't on an exchange that is having serious problems right now.

Signing up when you *know* the local area has a problem is not a particularly bright idea.