Sky 'to bid' for Tiscali We're indebted to The Sunday Times for a reminder that Tiscali is still for sale. According to the paper, Sky has entered "exclusive" talks to buy the UK ISP business for an "indicative price" of £450m. Due diligence could bring the figure down. Acquiring Tiscali's 1.8 million subscribers would boost Sky from fifth to third …
it would be nice to get new overlords,
I have been a pipex customer for oooooh ages. since 512kbps "broadband" :)
the service has suffered loads since Tiscali took over
however since being coaxed to the homecall version of Pipex by Tiscali (previously I was on xtreme), I have only been paying for the phone service, the BB is free, so I get what I pay for I suppose.
Sky had a shaky start, I helped a lot of friends and rellies get around the awful initial customer service, but these days I rarely have to deal with problems Sky related, they really have improved their service.
This post has been deleted by its author
I agree with Dan - Sky CS has been excellent for me too. Not only that but every package appears to be uncapped , they all reach the advertised speed and the cost ranges from free to a tenner.
I don't understand why so many of you love to knock Sky - its one of the few things in the UK that give a great service and excellent value. Just ask anyone who uses it, what they think of Sky, and I'm sure you'll find that the vast majority love it. Why don't you save your trolling for BT/BBC?
Quite agree Dan. I had several calls from unhappy clients in the early days of Sky - mostly to do with email issues rather than BB. Now I can't remember when the last call was.
Most of the calls I get know are related to TalkTalk (& AOL) and Orange.
It's interesting walking around with my iPod Touch watching for wifi transmitters. In a residential area probably two-thirds of the visible transmitters seen in a 20 minute walk are Sky. Two-thirds of the rest are generally BT homehubs (or other BT devices) and the remainder are weirdly renamed (or not in many cases) Netgears, Belkins and D-Links. I'm not seeing as many Linksys as I used to.
What I do find odd though, is the number of HP Setup transmitters I come across.
Is it really so bad that they can't even give it away for free ??? [1] Only 20% of Sky customers actually have their broadband with Sky!? "Sky broadband growth of 164,000, to 1.792million, >>>20% of Sky homes<<<" from http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=104016&p=irol-corphome
Finally, something the Murdoch machine doesn't understand (same as they didn't understand "interactivity" with British Interactive Broadcasting a few years back).
[1] free to new customers only, small print and extra fees apply for existing Sky customers
I have been with sky since 2006 and to be honest the CS was crap, and there were a lot of complaints. However these days they have improved a hell of a lot, especially after the DLM disaster that is still on-going. CS is definitely a lot lot better then the early days, of course some people will still have problems but not on the scale at the start.
As for taking over TIscali, well I have mixed views on this. The competition is healthy as it is keeping prices low and people are getting a good deal, if they take tiscali, they are effectivly taking Pipex customers as well, knocking out some big competition, but I suppose there will be other ISP's still.
Another point is the easynet network. At the moment I don't suffer from any congestion problems or oversubscribing of the network and I don't know of any Sky BB customer who has(not to say there are none, just very few). Taking all of Tiscali's customers onto the easynet network may not work as that would overload it but I would suppose a merger of parts of the network into easynet's network, particularly the international fibre links. I am worried that this may well be the start of oversubscribing on Sky's network, on what was on the right track to becoming a faultless service.
By the way just in-case anyone was wondering why I kept on mentioning Easynet, its basically Sky does not have a Broadband network like its Sky satellite system. It brought out a ISP, which I believed supplied to business customers only, which had its own nation-wide Fibre network, so was connected to the London Internet exchange and the rest of the internet. Sky took this put their own equipment in the exchanges and hooked it up to this network, which carries all of sky's internet traffic.
in response to Nazakat, Easynet were a business ISP, and Easynet Enterprise still are, however the Easynet LLU network was upgraded to provide SMPF services to Easynet's Consumer company, UKOnline, enabling Easynet to sell both MPF and SMPF services.
Before BSkyB came along the network was upgraded again to provide Wholesale services to other ISPs, ie/ Freedom2Surf - yes F2S was not only owned and operated by the Pipex Group, but there were a small number of services being provided off both the Pipex Communications LLU network and also the Easynet LLU network.
BskyB came along in 2006 and the network deployment significantly ramped up using the same technologies and hardware provided within the old Easynet Ltd exhanges, it was just BSkyB's money being spent. No new equipment has magically transformed the network, the serivces provided and supported have taken a lot of hard graft from within the business and hence why services provided to end users is significantly better then those provided by Tiscali. However what people must remember is that it's been well over two years now since BSkyB bought Easynet and UKOnline, and it's only been 16 months since Tiscali bought out Pipex, and on top of this they not only bought the Pipex network, but also <N>, F2S, Toucan, Homecall etc etc - there's a multitude of businesses and networks now sitting in Tiscali all intertwined with one another, and yet there's only 1 network sitting in BSkyB and that's the Easynet one...
I wish BSkyB the best of luck if this is successful, becuase they're going to have their hands full. I'd advise them to take a tip from the CPW Group, and learn from their experiences! If you think your services are problematic now, just wait until the next giant merger/takeover!
So... BT Homehub all the way I say!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
