Sky Digital woes..... Any advice or experiences welcome!

wheatln2

OK, hi everyone. So this is pretty long, but I'd appreciate if you read my tale of woe...

6 weeks ago I signed up to Sky Digital online, with a projected installation date of September 6th. We were told an engineer would call to confirm the date closer to the time, but September 6th arrived and there was no call. I rang the painfully unfriendly customer support team and after waiting 25 minutes was told my installation was scheduled for January 1st 2007, I then "kindly requested" that the date be moved forward and explained that I had selected September 6th initially. Anyway, they rescheduled for the 18th.

On September 18th Sky Digital was installed by a very unhelpful man who was unwilling to help out with the wiring and instead fed it in from the roof and made me take it from the tiles down through the roof to the back of the TV, I had to drill the holes and do the wiring by myself. The wiring round the dish was left very messily and the cable from our old Chorus aerial was used but left attached to the aerial so when the Chorus team come to disconnect there will be further problems. The rooms were left with boxes and disguarded plastic and ends of the wiring left on the ground. The phone lines (we have multiroom so need both boxes to be connected to a phone line) were just trailed along the floor from the socket through doorways. I then spent an hour drilling holes for these phone lines with extensions and connections I had to buy myself. I was willing to accept this though and acknowledge the phonelines as being the responsibility of the customer. I do wonder is every customer, be they a 70 year old widow made to do half of the co-ax wiring and phone line supply themselves...

Anyway, since then I have had to ring Technical support as we couldn't connect using our phoneline, supposedly because the number 142 wasn't put in as a phone prefix which is the standard in ROI, again surely the responsiblity of the install team.

I didn't received a direct debit mandate or proper contract in the post, which has meant I can't sign up for Prem Plus. These were supposedly posted on Aug 29th but arrived on Wednesday. The contract is a "ROI non-signatory" one which has nowhere for a signature, even though the customer support team has told me I need to sign it and send it back before the Prem Plus can be activated.

Again, this was all still deemed fairly acceptable as the viewing experience was great. However last night, there were strong winds and since then the signal has been choppy and dropping on one system and the other returns a "no signal" message. As I type this, neither system is returning any signal (same deal in the signal test screen) and having plugged them boht out to reset, neither are doing anything now. I rang the customer support technical people, and had to go through a retarded rigmarole of plugging things in and out, checking connections, resetting the dish via the skybox etc. I was happy to do this as I presumed it would be like other technical support teams (DELL for example) whereby you go through a checklist of things and then are told a technical assistant will be out to you tomorrow or the next day. I was then told that a technician would be out to check on the dish, wait for it, on October the 6th. 2 weeks away. To say I am now raging is an understatement. I went onto the roof just to check that all connections were still OK and everything seemed fine. So, I think it must be the dish's direction has changed a little bit, or the tiles have somehow cut into the wires. The fact one of the signals was kinda there or thereabouts for a lot of today confuses me greatly. I would hold suspicisions regarding the technicians as they were sloppy doing the work at the TV (not tidying up or caring about cables), and the white bit at the front (the LNBC?) of the dish wasn't secured properly and was about 10mm slid out, which affected the angle it would receive signals at. I pushed this back in and no change.

What should I now do, I mean waiting for 2 weeks having had so many problems so far (delayed installation, no contract, poor installation service) is a pain in the ass. I enjoy the sky system and setup once everything is working, and so don't want to go and get rid of it now. I do however, find their service to be very problematic and want to know is there any point calling them again and demanding a closer date of a technician calling round, I have just hit brick walls in the past week with the people on these lines as it's like they're reading from a script (one deviated from it to aske me what football team I supported which was very surprising!), and wonder should I even bother to do anything or just wait.

On a sidenote, I'm thinking that I may reconnect the chorus cable and box for the next 2 weeks as it should still be there, the aerial is just there and I'll have to do is screw out the coaxial from the dish to the aerial. Anyone see any problems with this? I've cancelled the DD and account with Chorus but I think it takes a month, and they may not realise they haven't been paid for a while.

That's it. Apologies for taking so long but hope I got everything across... Any thoughts, ideas or stories more than welcome. Cheers, Nigel

byte

Jeez! That service is shoddy to say the least!

Try ringing them again and explain that no Sky until October is just not on. Have you explained your woes so far, in that you'd to do half the work yourself?

I would expect that the alignment of the dish is awry. The fact that one sort-of worked and one stopped working would assume this. One of the receivers may have a more sensitive tuner than the other. Also one is using the cable for Chorus TV which is not a good method of practice IMO.

wheatln2

OK, so I got back onto Sky this morning, and told them about all of this and that their service just wasn't on. Got through to a supervisor manager type and she said she'd get onto their other independent service team and try and get a closer date for a technician (possibly a non Sky one) to call out. Hopefully some time in the next few days. And to confuse the issue even more, one of the sky boxes is now showing up a few channels...

kbell

Terrible service.

I've seen some shoddy installs over the years, yesterday i had a service job, when i got there i discovered that the original installer had cut his cable run too short it was about 6 inches from the cable entry point.
To repair this he had wired a standard uhf tv wall plate to the end of his cable!,drilled out his hole to a bigger diameter, shoved out the fly lead which came with the digi box, plugged it into the plate,and wrapped the whole lot with insulating tape.
Inside he had chopped off the other end of the fly lead, attached an f conector with tape.

Did you get the name of your installer/company??
These people should be named and shamed.

Avns1s

I would suggest always going to an independent reseller who is a sky agent. Then at least, you have some local point of contact for any problems that arise and they may just care slightly about their reputation.

For this type of stuff, it keeps you away from having to deal with the condescending bull**** of the Sky customer support team and their scottish accents.

Heinz

Avns1s wrote:

For this type of stuff, it keeps you away from having to deal with the condescending bull**** of the Sky customer support team and their scottish accents.

They put on Indian accents when I call!

byte

kbell wrote:

Terrible service.

I've seen some shoddy installs over the years, yesterday i had a service job, when i got there i discovered that the original installer had cut his cable run too short it was about 6 inches from the cable entry point.
To repair this he had wired a standard uhf tv wall plate to the end of his cable!,drilled out his hole to a bigger diameter, shoved out the fly lead which came with the digi box, plugged it into the plate,and wrapped the whole lot with insulating tape.
Inside he had chopped off the other end of the fly lead, attached an f conector with tape.

Did you get the name of your installer/company??
These people should be named and shamed.

:eek: Jeez! That was amateurish to say the least!

com7

AH WELL i can nt believe you still want to keep it after all that chorus must have been even worse if you ll still keep sky after that shocking service

Blaster99

Does Sky guarantee an installation for any period of time?

watty

1 year from original contract. Or it used to be.