Old Age Safety Alert - Lifeline

[GD1]

@Charlie+Sky I'm not sure what else the forunm can advise as we have given all the info we can.

[TimmyBGood]

@Charlie+Sky 

One place to start would be by registering the account with the Sky Accessibility Department : that flags the address as being occupied by someone potentially vulnerable.  They may also be able to advise on additional lines of contact.

As @GD1 started by indicating, it's not actually the job of a domestic ISP on a budget subscription to provide safety critical services and realistically they are simply not equipped to do so: failover of such a service to cellular data with a battery power supply backup should be the minimum specification for any real resilience.

[Charlie+Sky]

Thank you: I didn't know about the Accessibility Department - that sounds a good place to start.

I think both you and GD1 are slightly missing the point of my query with the 'it's not their fault, you should have a more secure system'. I'm not thinking or suggesting that the loss of service is Sky's fault or that it's their responsibility to ensure they are maintaining a secure fail-safe service. I am simply trying to find out HOW to contact them from somewhere other that the account-holder's house if we find that there is a problem (that perhaps we have seen and they(Sky) haven't).

If I do think that something is Sky's fault it's their lack of accessibility: they appear to be hiding - and spending far more time saying 'it's not my fault' rather than engaging with the problem.

You've been very kind with your time - both of you - but frankly I haven't got any nearer to being able to talk to Sky directly. 
Very frustrating!

[TimmyBGood]

@Charlie+Sky 

I think we're just trying to be realistic. 

A care alarm / alert running off broadband has multiple single points of failure both inside and outside the address, and isn't within the remit of an ISP anyway: they just provide a stream of bits to a router. If an alarm monitoring system generates a loss of contact message then there's very little an ISP can do other than their standard troubleshooting which largely relies on someone being present at the address to do things like checking power and physical connections, and if the ISP does end up diagnosing a fault then it goes into the standard 'up to the end of two working days' Openreach response queue anyway.

You'll certainly find multiple posts here expressing annoyance with inadequate information from Sky in the event of wider outages, and we routinely chide them about this.

[Laing1]

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@Charlie+Sky wrote:

'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.

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@Charlie+Sky I'm not sure if Sky allow this but one way to discuss your fathers account  with you would be if your father could give authority to Sky for you to deal with the Sky account.  

[Charlie+Sky]

I do already have that authority. However I still do not appear to be able to speak to anyone other than a salesman. (They are very happy for me to change his account, increase the number of features he pays for, etc). However most of the time when I have tried ringing they have told me I am not the account holder before I have even said which account I am trying to talk about!