Old Age Safety Alert - Lifeline

[Charlie+Sky]

The recent outage of Sky Broadband and Talk services highlighted a problem with our elderly father and his 'Lifeline' emergency alert system. The Lifeline company notified us of loss of phone service, but it did not appear to be possible for us to contact Sky to alert them of the issue. This has very real safety repercussions.

How do you contact a real person at Sky in an emergency when you are not actually at the address with the account?

(If I had been at the address with the account) how do I talk to Sky from the address with the account if the phone line is not working?

A very real problem - can anyone help?

[GD1]

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@Charlie+Sky wrote:

The recent outage of Sky Broadband and Talk services highlighted a problem with our elderly father and his 'Lifeline' emergency alert system. The Lifeline company notified us of loss of phone service, but it did not appear to be possible for us to contact Sky to alert them of the issue. This has very real safety repercussions.

How do you contact a real person at Sky in an emergency when you are not actually at the address with the account?

(If I had been at the address with the account) how do I talk to Sky from the address with the account if the phone line is not working?

A very real problem - can anyone help?

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As Sky are a domestic provider there is no emergency contact options, as harsh as it sounds when there is an outage to broadband it's not Sky's responsibility to provide a back up or emergency contact option, there would be no point as Sky could not give the line any kind of priority as the SLA's for repairs are laid out by openreach.

In fact I'd argue it is the responsibility of the Life line provider to upgrade their service to work off 4G rather then be relient on fixed phone lines as I'm sure the service is being paid for by the end user.

[TimmyBGood]

@Charlie+Sky 

Are you attempting to restore service because it's still out, or querying reliability (which @GD1 has addressed)?

In the event of ISP or Openreach network disruption no broadband connection can be guaranteed in any way, and there's also no realistic way to prioritise any particular domestic customer, no matter how vulnerable.

[Charlie+Sky]

Neither.

I had no way of knowing whether the problem was local or national, I had no way of advising Sky of the problem if they didn't already know about it; and I had no way of knowing if they knew about it. 
I would like to know how I make contact under such circumstances, and how I know  the problem is being addressed.

With BT it was no problem: you could simply ring and they would respond.

So far I have not found this sort of line of communication with Sky.

Is there a way?

[Charlie+Sky]

What's an SLA?

With the old analogue services, whoever your provider, you needed to contact them if there was an outage and they then contacted Openreach. Simple!

I'm not looking for a contractual solution or recompense; I'm trying to find out how I make sure someone is aware of the problem.

Essentially you appear to be saying 'you can't!'. 
So we could lose the service for weeks or months and there would be no way of gaining help? Surely not!

[TimmyBGood]

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@Charlie+Sky wrote:

So far I have not found this sort of line of communication with Sky.

Is there a way?

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Sky runs call centres: the number is at the bottom of the online troubleshooting pathways (we can't post it here)

The main problem is that in the event of a widescale ISP-level broadband outage (as that last one was) there will be many thousands of calls hitting the call centre capacity every minute*, so the chance of getting through at all is slim and there will be no useful response anyway, other than ' we know it's broken: you'll have to wait for it to be fixed '

*Sky supplies around six million domestic households with broadband, so an outage affecting even a small percentage rapidly overwhelms any realistic call centre staffing.

[TimmyBGood]

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@Charlie+Sky wrote:

What's an SLA?

Service Level Agreement

So we could lose the service for weeks or months and there would be no way of gaining help? Surely not!

For individual line problems the call centre is the appropriate option, but you'll need to be authorised to speak on behalf of another acount holder.  For national-level broadband outage, see above.

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[Laing1]

I notice you mentioned the old analogue system are you/your father on the new voip where your calls are over the internet ? If  yes then with the outage your phoneline would not work but Sky always ask questions regarding if you have otherways to make calls or if you have any alarms etc that rely on the phoneline before provisioning the voip phoneline

[Charlie+Sky]

I'm not asking about what Sky did or didn't say, I'm trying to find out how to make sure they know about a problem when it occurs 

[Charlie+Sky]

But I am authorised. I still couldn't get to talk to anyone 

[Laing1]

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@Charlie+Sky wrote:

I'm not asking about what Sky did or didn't say, I'm trying to find out how to make sure they know about a problem when it occurs 

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@Charlie+Sky  you would need to call Sky either by landline if it's working or if the landline isn't working by mobile 

[Charlie+Sky]

....and my question is: HOW?

I seemed to get turned away from every phone number I tried either because I wasn't in the house or because (without them even asking for an account number or anything like that) they insisted I was not authorised to talk about that particular account.

How do I get past that to talk to an actual real person?

[GD1]

@Charlie+Sky  In the case of an outage that sky know about and will have posted on their status page there would simply be no point calling them for any updates, you literally would be wasting time.

[TimmyBGood]

@Charlie+Sky 

Realistically you're always going to be at a disadvantage when calling on behalf of someone else (frankly it's best not to start by saying that), and doing so while an ISP is encountering a major meltdown in service is not exactly ideal.  There will also always be a problem with not calling from the address in question because that rules out the basic diagnosis and troubleshooting which call centre scripts insist upon.

[Charlie+Sky]

'In the case of an outage that Sky know about' is fairly obvious and isn't the focus of what I was asking .

What do I do if they DON'T (or probably don't) know about it?

(I do not live in the same house, but I do get the alarm messages regarding his services. I may be away on business when I get an alert: I can't wait what could be days to go round there to try and sort it)

There must be a solution : all I was asking was how to get through under thise circumstances.

I don't think that's expecting too much.

with the old analogue BT service I could have sorted it; with a digital BT service at my home, I can still sort it. It seems to be a particular Sky problem. There must be some sort of help available.