Copper Exchange switch off - Additional Costs

[VillageYokel]

Good Morning,

Posting this for a relative as I am handling her account for her at the moment (for anyone who browses other parts of the forum, this is a second relative - I am glutton for punishment)

They have received the notification that their copper phone line exchange is being closed between now and the end of the year. They have:

• A Sky Plus box
• An ADSL phone line package
• No Broadband

Upon contacting the number on the Sky letter, the call centre operator said that the only solution is to sign up for the £20 a month Broadband package in order to keep the phone line and number. They then said that because I mentioned the mobile phone signal is patchy in the area, Sky will now refuse to install Broadband at all because of the risk to life in a power cut.

Now the patchy mobile phone signal is true. Among the family we have EE and Vodafone connections and we all struggle to get a signal, however others in the same building have Sky Broadband.

So I am trying to find a solution. £20 a month on top of the Talk package surely is not the solution for someone who does not even know what the Internet is? Like blimey, last time there was an issue with the Sky Plus box, I had to tether to my phones hotspot and it took some time to get the updates done when the signal strength dropped!

Any novel ideas? I suspect the answer will be "Upgrade a 90 year old to Sky Glass which will be so confusing it will never get used."

[Mark39]

@VillageYokel given your relative's age, I'd suggest calling the number given in the 'Get in touch' section of Sky's help guide here (regardless of any Telecare or other medical equipment):

https://www.sky.com/help/articles/telecare-and-care-alarms?irct=cn-help-health-tel-med-al

They may have other options than the more general number in the letter your relative received.

[VillageYokel]

Thanks Mark, 

I will give the other number a call, as talking to the employee last night I get the impression that if we do not do something before the exchange is cut then we also lose the number.

[TimmyBGood]

@VillageYokel 

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@VillageYokel wrote:

• A Sky Plus box
• An ADSL phone line package
• No Broadband

---

Perhaps you mean a direct exchange line (DEL)?

ADSL is a form of broadband.

For information: it's BT which is the designated Universal Service Obligation provider (except in Kingston upon Hull)

Sky may or may not be offering a 'line-only' solution: I believe they aren't obliged to.

Sky Glass is subscription television: there's no requirement to move off Sky+ in this context.

[VillageYokel]

I was going from the memory of the conversation on the phone, so it might not have been ADSL, it might have been something else, but it was definitely the £20 a month extra because broadband would be needed.

As for Sky Glass - when another member of the family wanted to get rid of their long out of spec router, they were told the router would only be replaced if they upgraded their own Sky Plus box to Q or Glass. So they are still running on more than a decade old hardware.

[TimmyBGood]

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@VillageYokel wrote:

As for Sky Glass - when another member of the family wanted to get rid of their long out of spec router, they were told the router would only be replaced if they upgraded their own Sky Plus box to Q or Glass. So they are still running on more than a decade old hardware.

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I'm afraid that sounds like a frankly unscrupulous sales technique by a bad agent.  Sky is obliged to replace Hubs which don't meet current UK regulations for internet routers (the Q Hub and everything earlier) and Sky+ HD works just fine with a 2019 Sky Broadband Hub.

Later Hub models which use WPA3-T WiFi encryption by default would need that moving to WPA2-PSK for a Sky+ HD box to connect wirelessly.

[VillageYokel]

So some progress  which actually makes more  sense.

Having spoken to a few different people at Sky; it was not  originally mentioned that although the Sky Broadband would be an addional cost, there is no telephone charge, which almost means one cancels out the other. 

So we have some ideas that we are now putting together to look at options.

[TimmyBGood]

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@VillageYokel wrote:

Having spoken to a few different people at Sky; it was not  originally mentioned that although the Sky Broadband would be an addional cost, there is no telephone charge, which almost means one cancels out the other. 

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Be careful there.

It's correct that there's no charge for the Sky Talk Internet Calls service to be present on the broadband circuit, and no separate 'line rental'.

Actually using the default Sky Talk Pay As You Talk product to make outbound calls is however really, really expensive.