Sky ADSL2+ broadband is updated

WE'VE BEEN trialling the new Sky broadband service at this hack's home for sometime now, and wrote a preliminary review of the service here.

Unfortunately since the article was published the service has been unstable, requires frequent router reboots and is prone to serious downtime.

At least some of the problems with erratic behaviour on one of the worst days was explained by a £6 million burglary on Easynet offices, which certainly didn't help existing matters with the service.

These problems came to a head last Monday when our service went down completely. After waiting 24 hours for the service to resume, Sky support was called. After the usual talking-through of restarting the PC and rebooting the router (all of which was done prior to the call), the support agent stated that she would put us through to 'tier-3' support.

A two hour wait commenced. Within that time this hack managed to shave, shower, cook and eat dinner, whilst also consuming three glasses of wine from a cheap bottle of Cote du Rhone. At this point we gave up, and rang again.

The next agent stated that we shouldn't have been put on a transfer to tier 3, and that this level of support was meant to call us back at their convenience.

'Their convenience' means within a staggering five days. Quickly browsing through forums such as Adslguide and Skyuser suggested we'd be lucky getting a call at all, as many customers hadn't ever received their calls from either tier 2 or tier 3 support.

At this point we chose to give up, and had to resort to banding the good INQ name to Sky's PR department to ensure they finally got they're act together.

Several calls from PR and a chap from tier 3 identified the problem as having occurred at the exchange. BT had somehow reverted the cabling back to itspre -Sky-LLU status, for no clear reason. Fortunately BT were called and stated that they'd fix the service on the Saturday. Only 5 days downtime then.

Come Saturday morning the router was periodically rebooted to see if any updates from the exchange had filtered through. But nothing had changed, and nothing did all weekend. The Sky engineer failed to call as promised.

Monday was devoid of any calls from Sky's technical support department and a promised follow-up call from their customer service rep also failed to materialise.

Finally come Tuesday afternoon, out of the blue, BT phoned and said they'd corrected the fault. Suddenly Sky tech support and customer services were back on the phone celebrating that the service had only been down for a week.

Obviously it's hard to point the finger of blame in this situation. But we can certainly conclude that Sky's level of service and support for the new Sky Broadband range is below a satisfactory level.

A five-day call back period by a technical support engineer of a trained level actually able to assist you, at their earliest convenience, is not good enough.

Promised calls from customer-focused departments that are never made and a general malaise regarding support for customers with serious downtime, does not bode well for the new broadband entrant's intended push into 8 million Sky customers homes.

Sky, you must try harder. µ

See also
Sky broadband brings ADSL2+ to the masses
Sky will be a broadband heavyweight
Sky launches cheapo broadband service
Sky Plus goes mobile