Vonage & Sky

[jameson_uk]

I was thinking about changing telecom to Vonage and TV to Sky (currently have Telewest for everything and will be keeping broadband for the time being).

I have been told by sky that they can not install sky if you only have a Vonage line and you would need to pay their "non-standard" costs for a box and installation etc.

Anyone have any comments on this ??? Would there be anything to stop me converting to Vonage after sky was installed

[dejongj]

I think you break their small print terms and conditions...I've always had that problem with Sky as I use ISDN2e lines at home to which you can't plug in the sky box...

At least I was able to respond yes to the question whether I have a BT line ;-)
The only difference is that you can't use Interactive features that need to phone home, no great loss I think...And the installer has to phone the contact center to activate your viewing card to your box, they always give me a sigh like it is a great effort, but I never had to pay extra for it...

[jameson_uk]

Originally Posted by dejongj

I think you break their small print terms and conditions...I've always had that problem with Sky as I use ISDN2e lines at home to which you can't plug in the sky box...

I could possibly live with that

At least I was able to respond yes to the question whether I have a BT line ;-)
The only difference is that you can't use Interactive features that need to phone home, no great loss I think...And the installer has to phone the contact center to activate your viewing card to your box, they always give me a sigh like it is a great effort, but I never had to pay extra for it...

I was under the impression that you no longer needed a BT line for Sky but just a phone line. I must admit I am struggling to understand why it would not work if it is just a standard call but there we go. I may contact Vonage as I am sure they are going to be more help than Sky !!

[dejongj]

Originally Posted by jameson_uk

I was under the impression that you no longer needed a BT line for Sky but just a phone line. I must admit I am struggling to understand why it would not work if it is just a standard call but there we go. I may contact Vonage as I am sure they are going to be more help than Sky !!

Just a phone line is a broad statement In fact a lot of carriers are already using VOIP in the background without you knowing it...Where you could get into difficulties using a company like Vonage is that some telephone number can not be guaranteed to work across their network. It should be a simple configuration request but in practise it is not that simple...It also depends on how they are connected to the PSTN and get routed back to the Sky 'walled' server farm...
The simple fact is that you don't need the phone line to watch Sky or multi-screen BBCi for example...It is just when you want to vote to those reality TV's etc or buy your lottery tickets that the sky box needs to phone home as you don't have a sattelite uplink...

Unfortunately the sky servers are not connected for general access to the Internet, caused a project I managed on a lot of problems to keep our content up-to-date....But that is a whole different story....