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Comment by voltagex_ | Hacker News Reader

Interested Australian user here. That's about half of the cost of our cheaper monthly ADSL2 plans - what's the catch? How far away from the exchange are you?

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Well I was an O2 customer. Sky bought O2 last year and in the effort to maintain their customer-base they will give you silly offers if you argue with them for long enough. It's usually £20.50/month including line rental but I argued it down to £7.50/month on the basis I stayed with them for 12 months.

No catch. Confirmed no traffic management, no download limit, free router, free migration. This is purely for customer retention.

I'm 800m away from the exchange and get 12.2Mbits down and 1.1Mbits up.

I pull an average of 120Gb/month over the line with no problems.

Edit: just to add I was paying £35.50/month with O2 before which is crazy amounts.

I wish I was having as good a time as you are.

I was on o2 for 3-4 years before being transferred over to Sky last month. Since transferring, I've had nothing but problems. Online gaming pings have gone from 20 -> 50, download speeds have fallen 20-30%, my connection frequently hangs (Youtube is near unusable), and I now have issues loading websites from time to time (I had to refresh Google 3 times before it loaded earlier). To make things worse, Sky is charging me £15.50 a month while o2 was only charging £7.50.

Thankfully, BT is installing fibre in my area so I should be able to jump over to plus.net sometime soon. I can't wait.

If it's unusable, tell them and say you will stop paying for it as it doesn't live up to their advertising. Your rights are protected outside the contract. Threaten to complain to Ofcom if they resist. They'll let you leave and give you the MAC code.

I'm in London and my exchange has Sky LLU support. Coincidentally I live in the same postcode as Sky HQ so any problems, I'll talk face to face with them as I have some contacts.

I did ring technical support to get the issues fixed last Thursday -- apparently a higher level technician will call me back within '10 working days'. Hmm.

I'm not trapped by a 12 month contract, which is why I'm not too annoyed about the situation. My cabinet will get fibre fitted early next month, so I should only have to endure Sky for another month or two thankfully, which is ok by me.

Cool good news then :)

Sky don't have the best reputation when it comes to issue resolution. I was a former Sky broadband customer and found their customer care and technical teams to be woefully lacking. Additionally, they have no real SLA to speak of, and all of their service plans (as far as I understand) have a standard 1:50 contention ratio. Ouch. And when I was a customer (a couple of years ago), they refused to divulge the the ADSL (PPPoA) RADIUS credentials, making it much more difficult to use your own ADSL router.

For many users (especially your average home/family users with less technical requirements, not using it for critical purposes such as home working) they're probably perfectly adequate.

FWIW, I use BT's (formerly British Telecom) FTTC Infinity for Business product. 78Mbps down, 20Mbps up, worst case 1:20 contention, no caps or allowance-related FUP. Their customer care and technical teams are pretty decent. And I can get a /29 in addition to the dynamic PPP IP for the WAN link. Where I am (NE Scotland), BT own all of the widely available (non-private) infrastructure so it's easier to deal with a single company in the event of a failure vs being pushed between ISP and infrastructure provider. YMMV.

EDIT: FYI I pay £45 ex VAT (~AUD 102).

I'm actually using my line for home working 100% of the time. However I have a backup (3G card in my laptop and friendly neighbours with different ISPs including different mode Cable and WiFi). I think that is a better investment than an expensive line to start with simply because regardless of who you are with, the end of the line is with OpenReach who are abysmal. The difference between £100/month and £7.50/month is moot then.

I treat my home connection like a coffee shop's WiFi.

The real meat and two veg of my setup is a hosted desktop I RDP into and a number of hosted Linux machines.

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