Sky broad band

[Frenchie]

How good are they? We're about to get a satellite package from them and could include this service at little extra cost. Any subscriber here? Any particular issue? We only use our home internet to surf and email.

[hairyhippy]

We use the service. The wired pc runs fine pretty much all of the time, but our wireless connection to the laptop has a habit of falling over, which could well be due to the way we have things set up in our house rather than a problem at the Sky end of things.

[bobajobrob]

We use Sky. It works fine. The router comes preconfigured with your username and password so you just plug it in and off you go. The speed I get is not great, we have the "base" package (2 Mb). It seems to vary between 800 Kbps and 1.8 Mbps.

[Wibble]

I have the mid package and it's about as fast as the line can get (5 to 5.5 mega thingies).  Costs £5 a month on top of the satellite package.  If you are getting the satellite anyway (or in my case have a sports-obsessed housemate that gets it) then it's prolly the cheapest way of getting broadband that there is.

When the service started there were a few teething troubles at sky's end (it hadn't been running for long) and with the router, but those were fixed long ago.  It's been very reliable for the past, oooh, year and a half.

Everything is easy to set up.  My only regret is not buying their wireless card.  I bought a cheaper 802.11g card instead and the signals weren't quite clear enough for a reliable connection.  Going to a l-o-n-g cable connection sorted it.

Tip: If using an old 802.11b card and can't connect it's prolly 'cos they don't support WPA encryption.  You can change the encryption to WEP (or turn it off) quite easily.  There's a very useful unofficial support site at www.skyuser.co.uk.