ISP Reviews by Cheryl Wood

I made a terrible mistake when I agreed to change our ISP to SKY.

We changed from 1mbps via Tesco to 16mbps with Sky - so you might have thought our internet speed would be much quicker - oh no. Far far worse, it takes so long to load their own home page, we get the cannot display page message more often than not. But of course, Sky can find nothing wrong with our line.

When I installed the sky modem, it trashed my desktop pc (cursor stuck in middle of screen, from point of restart); it took 2 new motherboards and full system recovery to get it working again. What assistance did Sky's helpdesk have to offer me? Well first switch off the PC and then switch back it on; didn't help - oh - could you get your husband to check that you wired the mouse in properly! How sexist is that. It then got worse, because sky then refused to speak to me and would only communicate with my husband on all matters - despite me being an authorised contact on our original sky tv account. Only the man of the house will do for sky it seems. So ladies if you value your independence don't switch to sky.

We opted for the all package with sky - including switch phoneline from BT to sky as well. That switched on 28 April - almost immediately we got interference on the phone line. I rang up today - after 4 attempts and an hour on hold - i was told there again nothing wrong with our line, despite admitting they could hear the interfernce on their side as when I disconnect the modem, the interference reduced slightly. So if we want to make phone calls, we need to disconnect the modem - hang on, isn't that like an old fashioned dial up service?!?

Sky say we will be charge £99 for an engineer call out and £66 per hour thereafter. It will £99 if we are not in when the engineer calls - so guess what, they left a message of the day and time of that visit with my son, despite him saying I was in the bath. (Must have mistaken him for the man of the house!) Due to the interference on the line - he couldn't work out what they were on about. When I called back, they denied leaving a message with a child, as he would not know the account password. It just gets worse and worse.

I would recommend that you avoid Sky if you are thinking of changing ISP - we are counting the days till we can change to someone else.