A friend of mine's on sky bb and she's had a lot of trouble with it, dropped connections, unable to even get a connection. Spoke to her today and she said she rang them and it's been better since but still not perfect.
We were going to change from NTL (as was) internet to sky when we had the sky plus fitted.
Spoke to the installer who said that the sky internet was none too reliable and he had ditched his and gone onto NTL.
Hi am with virgin (ntl/comtel) have bin with them when they first came to Lichfield 9-10 years now have had the odd tantrum but nothing to much. Sky my friend had it nothing but problems from day one 3 sky boxes and still ****. :full You might be the lucky one??:
cheers Dave
just after I moved here to Middlesbrough, I had AOL and then Orange (both ASDL) and they were utter pap, max speeds of 1.2Mb and I was paying for 4. Changed to Virgin Media back in July, 4 Mb transfer, and upgraded to their 20Mb service in December. cos it's cable I get 19.2 offpeak and 17 peak. Virgins customer service leaves something to be desired, but if you live in a cable enabled area the deals they have are great.
As far as I know (and unless things have changed) sky broadband uses satellite for downstream, which will be a shared data stream (broadcast as opposed to unicast technology), and a phone line for upstream (unless you have a satellite transeiver which I doubt). Maybe they now have a DSL offering but I've not heard so. Anyway, I wouldn't go down this route unless I had no alternative. Cable or DSL are the valid economy options.
I use Zen Broadband (google it) who are probably not the cheapest but very good service, which is important to me as I run my business from home.
UPDATE: Just checked, sky broadband is now ADSL so you can disregard what I said above.
I was with Orange as well, I was on their unlimited package and made sure I stayed well within their fair use policy 21/12/2006 they cut me off saying I had exceded my download limit, which I hadn't. I was on the phone straight away and got their Indian call centre and an indian bloke calling himself "Clive" ?
He said they were using english names to make us feel at ease with them on the phone. Didn't make me at ease at all. After a long confersation of me telling him I didn't break their rules and reading the sub section in my contract stateing I was unlimited outside the hours 6 - 12, he called me a lair and put the phone down.
I wouldn't wipe my a£$e with Orange broadband ever again. I now use Eclipse and they have been great.
I'm with Sky having come over from VirginMedia about 10mths ago.
Virgin (or Telewest as I knew it) had a rock steady connection. I only ever noticed it going down about 3 times in the 3 years I had it.
Sky is definitely less stable, tend to reboot the router at least once a month, sometimes a couple of times a week but to be honest there's been nothing that's caused me major headaches. I'm certainly not looking at switching
Never had to use Sky customer service for broadband but I do hear it can be a bit of a nightmare. They've been great on the TV side though.