Sky Q availablity in Care Home

[sgen0414]

Maybe someone may have some advice. I ordered Sky for my mother who is in a care home. She loves football and it's the only way i could get Sky Sports to her room. There are other residents in the care home who have Sky in their room too and was told that this was the only service i could order for my mam by the care home. So i went ahead an ordered. Sky Q was installed this week but doesn't work as Sky Q has not been installed in the care home, apparently Sky carried out a site visit previously and decided against the installation due to costs. So it turns out the other residents have the old Sky HD box service which is no longer been sold by Sky. I cannot for the life of me talk to someone that can understand my issue, i've called twice and been put through to a call centre. They can't understand what i'm telling them. I'm so frustrated that a service was sold to me that wasn't available in the care home. I even spend additional money on an accessible remote control for my mother who has parkinsons. I've no spend most of the day on the phone trying to figure out what can be done. Any advice please??

[TimmyBGood]

@sgen0414 

Until relatively recently Sky was still supplying Sky+ subscription and hardware in locations where a communal system wasn't capable of getting Q reception, but it's quite possible that this has now ceased: they certainly no longer provide 'engineer' attendance to resolve problems with most existing Sky+ installations.

[Chodley]

It strikes me as utterly bizarre that they could install SkyHD but not Q (which requires a change to the dish LNB and probably the communal distribution hardware). Do the care home know who the installers are and can you talk to them?

[TimmyBGood]

@sgen0414 

You might want to draw the run-down of the Sky+ platform to the attention of the care home owners, as their existing residents will find functionality is disappearing and 'repairs' unavailable.  It's really up to the owners to fund the upgrade of a communal system to a modern standard: Q has been around since early 2016.

[nigea99]

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@Chodley wrote:

It strikes me as utterly bizarre that they could install SkyHD but not Q (which requires a change to the dish LNB and probably the communal distribution hardware). Do the care home know who the installers are and can you talk to them?

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@Chodley 

FYI I believe that Communal systems don't use a wideband LNB but still use the 4 separate outputs from Universal LNBs one for each polorisation & High /Low bands - the systems then respond to the requests. 

To use SKY Q either the distribution system uses  more modern  main equipment that  can respond directly to the dSCR commands from SKY Q (or SKY HD & Freesat) or smaller adapters are used on more local parts of the distribution system for 1 or 2 feeds (possibly slightly more but I am not sure) 

The systems must therefore have good enough signals for the adapters to work and enough power & space in any distribution panels

Updating Communal systems can be very costly