Sky hopeless
We have had to migrate a couple of our sites that were on Be Unlimited due to the Sky migration fiasco.
First Sky ask us to update the firmware on our modem/routers as we use them in bridged mode. Fine, we had to get someone out to each site to do this but it wasn’t the end of the world.
Then the week or the migration Sky notify us that the static IP address is changing. This was more of an inconvenience, but at this stage it was too late to migrate to another ISP. In the letters they did not even state which site the static address related to.
On the day of the migration we were expecting downtime, but not for the service not to work, and Sky’s support was a joke. To get ‘Pro’ support you had to first join the queue for the normal support, then queue again for the ‘Pro’ support, which meant on one occasion being on hold for an hour and 20 minutes. The normal support advice was useless and misleading. For example we were told said Sky doesn’t support static addresses.
Anyway, it is then that we learn that only one static IP address is supported by Sky. Since our modems are configured in bridge mode and we use the connections for VPN, we can live with that limitation.
However, even that service wouldn’t work. We could get an internet connection with the Sky router, but that doesn’t support bridge mode. We tried the BeBox v1 and v2 models, but couldn’t get them working, and we also tried third party modems.
The Pro support were helpful but said that the Be Box v1 would never work, they were tweaking the firmware on the V2 model, but most of the time they couldn’t get that to work, and although they had promised that customer supplied routers would work, they were having difficulty with that too.
I was told that the majority of customers migrations worked fine, but that static addresses were something new to Sky, but why had they done no testing beforehand; and if Sky could not support what we wanted and had with Be Unlimited, at least have the courtesy of letting us know.
We have now migrated our connections to other ISPs – Virgin Media and 186k who at least understand the concept of a business level of service and static IP addresses. The Sky fiasco has wasted a lot of our time, and caused unnecessary downtime. Thankfully, with difficulty we managed to re-route the traffic through other connections.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
