Sky multiroom - No landline...

King Krib

I have the basic Sky Tv package plus a second box upstairs which I use for freeview channels. There's an old card in the box as I had multiroom in an old house. Is it possible to get multiroom now without a phoneline?

SteelyDanJalapeno

No, you need the phone line,

piperh

TiltedBrain wrote: »

No, you need the phone line,

Not strictly true there are ways around it And you don't need a landline to receive multiroom signal, i have sky + and 3 other multiroom boxes all without a landline and sky have never sent me a letter although i do know of others who sky have threatened to charge as seperate so its a chance you take.

steveon

piperh wrote: »

Not strictly true there are ways around it And you don't need a landline to receive multiroom signal, i have sky + and 3 other multiroom boxes all without a landline and sky have never sent me a letter although i do know of others who sky have threatened to charge as seperate so its a chance you take.

Yes u do.....Sky now ring the landline used when ordering multiroom and will not issue the cards until they get an answer on the phone. Its a stupid thing to need in this day and age as all us installers could get loads of extra work as a result if we could do installs without a landline.

pdstck

Hi All
I want to get a second box but dont have a land line, i do have a skype phone number would this do instead of landline, skype number is 076 .........

King Krib

pdstck wrote: »

Hi All
I want to get a second box but dont have a land line, i do have a skype phone number would this do instead of landline, skype number is 076 .........

Don't think so. It needs to be a fixed line othewise a mobile number would do.

bido

We have multiroom no phone line:rolleyes:

pdstck

bido wrote: »

We have multiroom no phone line:rolleyes:

HOW

helimachoptor

steveon wrote: »

Yes u do.....Sky now ring the landline used when ordering multiroom and will not issue the cards until they get an answer on the phone. Its a stupid thing to need in this day and age as all us installers could get loads of extra work as a result if we could do installs without a landline.

Yes and then boxes would end up in pubs, Spain etc..
The phone line is to ensure if you pay for 5 boxes you have 5 boxes at your house

IngazZagni

I have multi room but none are connected to a phone line and it works fine. We did get a letter threatening extra charges or something if we didn't connect it. However we don't have a phone line connection beside two of the tvs so I called them up offering them to come out and connect them for us. They said they would call us back but they never did and have not heard anything since, no extra charges.

Solair

I'm surprised they don't also require that you have a telex machine and a gramophone!

Landlines are going to die out quite rapidly and Sky seem to have issues with even some of the VoIP systems used by the wireless broadband services popular in rural / outlying urban hinterland areas as the modems don't work well over VoIP.

They seriously need to come up with a better solution.

Could they not just put a device in the LNB that sends a code out thus ensuring the boxes are connected together without all this cumbersome phone caller ID stuff??

Also you should be able to use the interactive services exclusively via the ethernet port or wifi. A slow phone line dial up connection is a joke in 2013!

That being said, we've had sky multi room for years and neither box has been connected to the line since about 2009 and they don't seem to care.

brandonviewer

there is also a discussion about this in frequently asked questions thread at the moment. i live in cork and have multiroom for well over a year without phone line. my multroom box has been located in kerry for all of this time without hassle from sky.

pdstck

brandonviewer wrote: »

there is also a discussion about this in frequently asked questions thread at the moment. i live in cork and have multiroom for well over a year without phone line. my multroom box has been located in kerry for all of this time without hassle from sky.

cute cork hooooooor, that why i'm stuck with one box because i have no landline

lawhec

Solair wrote: »

I'm surprised they don't also require that you have a telex machine and a gramophone!

Landlines are going to die out quite rapidly and Sky seem to have issues with even some of the VoIP systems used by the wireless broadband services popular in rural / outlying urban hinterland areas as the modems don't work well over VoIP.

They seriously need to come up with a better solution.

Could they not just put a device in the LNB that sends a code out thus ensuring the boxes are connected together without all this cumbersome phone caller ID stuff??

Also you should be able to use the interactive services exclusively via the ethernet port or wifi. A slow phone line dial up connection is a joke in 2013!

That being said, we've had sky multi room for years and neither box has been connected to the line since about 2009 and they don't seem to care.

While in Ireland (Republic, in case anyone asks) there has been a significant drops in residences with live landline telephone lines, it's been far less dramatic in the UK. While there are some people who have no landline phone and just have a mobile for phone calls (mainly those in their late-teens & twenties) most still have POTS lines for a variety of reasons.

First, the cost of line rental is generally cheaper with BT than Eircom, though this is starting to narrow thanks to things like BT and Sky paying ridiculous money for English Premier League soccer rights for three years from this August, with the latest line-rental hike taking place in the last quarter of 2012. Unlike Eircom however, other operators can lease the phone line from BT Openreach and sell it to their customers at a cheaper rate than BT whereas any provider over Eircom's network can only charge the same as the incumbent. Also several operators in the UK including BT offer significant savings in line rental if you pay up front for a year's fees as opposed to paying each month e.g. with BT normal line rental is now £15.45 per month with free weekend calls whereas paying for the year in advance works out at £10.75 a month. I haven't seen Eircom offer anything like this yet.

Second, unlike in Ireland no mobile operator in the UK has made any serious suggestion that 3G/3.5G mobile broadband can work as a valid replacement for ADSL. The closest any operator has got to this has been Three, with their highest inclusive data for MBB being 15GB a month (as opposed to 60GB for its Irish counterpart), and that with their "One Plan" you have unlimited data with tethering allowed though putting the SIM into a USB modem or Mi-Fi type device is strictly forbidden. Mobile BB as primary broadband use is restricted mainly to the likes of students or those for whom ADSL/FTTC services aren't available. Fixed wireless services are few and far between, mainly restricted and aimed at isolated rural communities e.g. Outer Heberdies where ADSL is unlikely to ever be viable. So broadband either by DOCSIS cable or the traditional telephone network is king, especially for streaming services like iPlayer, Sky On Demand, YouView etc. 3G just won't cut it.

Overall it means that even if someone has a broadband connection in and rarely uses the POTS phone, it's there for emergencies and comes part & parcel with line rental as naked DSL isn't available yet. It isn't much of an inconvenience to hook up a Sky multiroom system in this case, especially if you're getting a bundled package through them for TV, phone and broadband. If that's the way things stay in the UK, there isn't going to be a huge incentive for Sky to do anything different much to enforce multi-room subscriptions than what they can do now even if the pattern in Ireland is markedly different.

In terms for checking multi-room use without using a landline, the LNB suggestion would require special receivers and quad/octo LNB. Current LNBs isolate their respective outputs at present. It could work with a hardware & software upgrade to Videoguard for a master/slave system for the card in the master receiver to have commands and responses sent to cards in slave receivers via the coax to ensure that all registered receivers/cards are in the same "loop", if a slave card was missing after so many master commands failed to receive a number of consecutive responses it could deactivate all slave cards in the loop, with the master card doing an annoying "pop-up" every few minutes telling the viewer to immediately contact Sky otherwise the master card will also be deactivated in due course. You start running into problems however with non-Sky dishes & LNB's as well as possible complications with communal systems and maybe multi-switches. This is just off the cuff thinking though. As for Sky continuing to use dial-up for Sky Active services, those services don't require much bandwidth and also allow Sky to charge for premium call services. Again, likely the case that if it ain't broke...

At present Sky is probably comfortable enough in turning a blind-eye to strictly enforcing the terms of multiroom subscription discounts as they aren't having cashflow problems and continue to successfully run their pay-tv operation. But if they need to start getting a bit of money from somewhere without hiking subscription rates again, or subscriber numbers or ARPU start to fall I'd expect Sky to start enforcing the terms of multiroom subscriptions much more strongly.

But as for landlines dying out quickly - only when if mobile phone operators can start providing LTE or 5G mobile broadband services which have consistent speed, contention, ping times and unlimited (or as good as) data caps along with a price that can rival current FTTC or even higher speeds (>15Mb/s) on ADSL2+ broadband will the popularity of twisted copper pair lines start to be seriously threatened (at least in the UK). And if in a few years time BT start to think that rolling out FTTP on a major scale is a good idea, you're on to the next level up - though by that point POTS will go, replaced likely with either a provider-based VOIP service or just a "naked" connection with the subscriber taking on their own VOIP service if they want to.

Solair

The problem is that in Ireland, POTS is disappearing almost as fast as it is in the US. Lots of alternatives are there already and more are appearing.

The two markets are rapidly becoming quite different.

I think you're going to see a lot of growth of wISP services over the coming years here and a lot of people don't necessarily take out a PSTN service with those. Especially as more of them are now starting to offer services of 20mbit/s and above.

I'm not exactly sure what eircom's VDSL offering might be either. Naked VDSL is a distinct possibility and could prove popular if PSTN service is extra or pricey.

Sky Ireland will just have to deal with the different market circumstances. If they don't, they'll just lose customers too.

Eircom really shot itself in the foot by assuming the line demand is inelastic when you increase rental rates. Instead, people are ditching what they see as an unnecessarily expensive service.

In rural areas its also coupled with the fact that DSL broadband often doesn't provide adequate service or doesn't exist. So, wireless is more useful.

It's a combination of population density and eircom's policies though that have taken us here.

You can see a fairly dramatic fall off in fixed access paths :

http://www.comstat.ie/dataset/igraph/MakeGraph.asp?gr_type=0&gr_width=700&gr_height=500&gr_fontsize=12&menu=y&PLanguage=1&pxfile=t4+with+aggregations201312272663_1p1.px&wonload=600&honload=400&rotate=

Direct = Operator provided or LLU
Indirect = Wholesale Line Rental / Carrier Pre-select.

DSL's actually doing OK but cable broadband's really grown quite a lot! DSL seems to show a slight decline which I can assume is people switching to cable.
Mobile broadband's declining slightly. That could be because of better deals from cable/DSL providers.

Also, note the green line (narrowband) it plummeted over the last few years. It's now insignificant.

It's also interesting that it almost exactly follows the decline in telephone lines! So, I can only assume those people directly switched to alternative ways of accessing the internet and ditched their non-broadband capable phone lines ?

Also, interestingly FWA (wISPs) seem to be losing customers rather than increasing in size, which is the opposite from what I had assumed.
I'd say some of them are OK i.e. the ones with better technology. Others are providing speeds that aren't even as good as 3G mobile. I'm amazed at the number of wISPs still offering speeds in the 1-3mbit/s area.
The successful ones are offering really decent speeds!

Cantona's Collars

I assume with the take-up of Sky's Broadband offering,the amount of people who will be then able to get multiroom will increase.Customers will have an active phoneline for the BB/phone package and as a result there's no reason why they can't get multiroom.

Solair

zerks wrote: »

I assume with the take-up of Sky's Broadband offering,the amount of people who will be then able to get multiroom will increase.Customers will have an active phoneline for the BB/phone package and as a result there's no reason why they can't get multiroom.

Possibly, but there are two issues with that:

1) Sky broadband will be no faster than eircom's broadband as it's using the same infrastructure. It'll be ADSL2+ using BT Ireland's wholesale LLU product where available, Eircom ADSL2+ equipment in other areas with NGB enabled, or in areas currently stuck on "Classic ADSL", it will be up to 7.6Mbit/s i.e. just the bog-standard original eircom product wholesale.

So, if you've a faster product e.g. UPC in an urban area, you might not be too keen on switching.

2) In houses that don't have access to DSL broadband due to long lines / remote areas without DSL service at all, there will be no Sky DSL product either as it's using the existing DSL infrastructure. Sky aren't building anything new. It's just a wholesale DSL product managed by BT Ireland and branded up for Sky with customer service through Sky's CS infrastructure.

For some people it might be an incentive to activate a line, and it's a big bonus for eircom who will be getting line rental revenues if people switch back from UPC. (But they'd really want to be not to bothered about their broadband speed).

However, I can't see it making that huge a difference. There will still be plenty of cases where people won't necessarily want DSL / voice services at all.

Also, eircom's wholesale line rental charges are higher than BT Openreach. So, the prices will be higher here unless Sky are going to absorb that as a loss leader type product.

In terms of speed, the only hope is that Sky might do some wholesale product using eircom's new VDSL platform (fibre to kerb) whenever that switches on! Again, that'll only be in urban areas / towns / villages though. Not a hope of it in rural areas as the technology's totally unsuitable for long-lines.

I'd say you'll mostly see people who already use DSL products switching more than people who don't have phone lines at all / cable users.

pdstck

I cant get broaband with a landline where i'm living so sky broadband isn't an option for me. Have to depend on satelite for broadband in the countryside. Could sky not do something with satalite broadband and the ip address that is fixed to modem so you would have to switch it between houses if you moved second box ?

Squ

bido wrote: »

We have multiroom no phone line:rolleyes:

Again, how?

Capt'n Midnight

Solair wrote: »

Also, note the green line (narrowband) it plummeted over the last few years. It's now insignificant.

It's also interesting that it almost exactly follows the decline in telephone lines! So, I can only assume those people directly switched to alternative ways of accessing the internet and ditched their non-broadband capable phone lines ?

looks like 300,000 customers switched from landlines to mobile broadband from 2008-2011

Is there a graph that goes further back ?
and one that lists ESB residential connections too ? (ESB have ~2m connections)

Eircom have 1.3m residential connections , of these nearly 300,000 (75% of 387,000) are paid for from the Telephone Allowance paid by welfare.

So really just 1m people paying for an eircom line

Also the reality is that an eircom landline costs the same as basic SKY subscription so there is no way they could insist on it.


As for a signal from the LNB - LOL
SKY dishes are for receiving, to transmitt you'd need a much bigger dish with a huge LNB with a heatsink on it to handle the power, cost more than the rest of the system put together

what might work is a GPS mobile phone type thingy , like they use in alarm systems but there are costs and the basic rule is that if it costs more than the revenue they are loosing then not really a goer. Also it may be in thier interest to have people use second boxes to expand the market. Possibly as many as 10% of the 10 million UK subscriptions are for outside the UK

Solair

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

looks like 300,000 customers switched from landlines to mobile broadband from 2008-2011

Is there a graph that goes further back ?
and one that lists ESB residential connections too ? (ESB have ~2m connections)

Eircom have 1.3m residential connections , of these nearly 300,000 (75% of 387,000) are paid for from the Telephone Allowance paid by welfare.

So really just 1m people paying for an eircom line

Also the reality is that an eircom landline costs the same as basic SKY subscription so there is no way they could insist on it.


As for a signal from the LNB - LOL
SKY dishes are for receiving, to transmitt you'd need a much bigger dish with a huge LNB with a heatsink on it to handle the power, cost more than the rest of the system put together

what might work is a GPS mobile phone type thingy , like they use in alarm systems but there are costs and the basic rule is that if it costs more than the revenue they are loosing then not really a goer. Also it may be in thier interest to have people use second boxes to expand the market. Possibly as many as 10% of the 10 million UK subscriptions are for outside the UK

LOL Yourself & Happy New Year to you. Can't beat starting the new year with a good sneer!

There are times I don't know why I even bother posting on these forums! I'm in bad enough mood going back to work without getting LOL'd at for perfectly valid suggestions.

Of course I didn't mean the LNB would need to transmit back to the satellite!

What I meant was the LNB would generate a signal that the 2+ boxes would pick up on the local network. A simple serial number or something. That could be programmed into the box / viewing card and would ensure that the boxes were connected to the correct dish.

The other way of doing it would be to design an LNB that allowed the boxes to communicate with each other. I'm sure some arrangement of filters could allow a path through without messing up the satellite reception. All you'd need is a fairly narrowband channel that was out of the way of the satellite reception frequencies. The boxes could then handshake and ensure they were all connected together without the need to have extra wiring.

For either method all you'd need is some kind of device that connected after the LNB across each coax feed back to the boxes (only one of the cables, not both) Some kind of 'multiroom verification box'. Or a modified LNB that also carried out this function.

A third simple method would be to wifi enable the boxes and they'd all just need to be in WiFi range of each other / or are all on a single local network router.

This whole thing of expecting people to wire phone lines to every box is rather cumbersome!

Even where someone has a phone line installed, it's often not practical to expect them to provide phone connections in every room. In this day and age, a lot of houses only have 1 or 2 phone sockets and use DECT cordless phones anyway.

Capt'n Midnight

Solair wrote: »

What I meant was the LNB would generate a signal that the 2+ boxes would pick up on the local network. A simple serial number or something. That could be programmed into the box / viewing card and would ensure that the boxes were connected to the correct dish.
....
This whole thing of expecting people to wire phone lines to every box is rather cumbersome!

Even where someone has a phone line installed, it's often not practical to expect them to provide phone connections in every room. In this day and age, a lot of houses only have 1 or 2 phone sockets and use DECT cordless phones anyway.

Yes its possible to have a technical fix, but I just can't see the benefit.

An Irish solution to an Irish problem ? Irish customers are less than 7% of the total number of subscriptions. It's possible that the number of non-UK expat subscriptions exceeds the Irish subscriptions.

Most SKY customers are UK based where landlines are still relatively cheap and where insisting on a landline means there is the potential to lock up in with the offer of broadband AND they can also extract lots of tiny slices of money with the red button. They've millions of BB and telephone customers in the UK.

Lets not forget that SKY boxes have a second card slot, again the idea is to milk you / provide you with extra services

In the UK it's worth them trying to get you to have a landline, here they accept that it just isn't going to happen, it's only recently that they have offered any services via landline.



Yes it's technically possible for SKY to lock down the system, it's something they are very good at. But it's not worth their while to fix a loophole that could only benefit 7% of their customers if it kills the grey market. It's not worth another technology arms race where people figure out how to clone or share or bypass the LNB signals.

Look at the costs. It means that all upgrades would require an installer with a ladder to fit the a LNB.


SKY are doing boxes with network connections, they are doing wireless thingamy buzzers, so when , in the future enough boxes have a network connection then perhaps they could do it that way through a software update maybe, but only if they could find a way that didn't upset existing customers.

Solair

The interactive services are only really much use if they go through a broadband connection though.

I cannot see the point of the old Sky Active stuff. It's just so painfully slow to use!

I think the high hopes for Interactive TV really didn't pay off. It's OK for a bit of news / actual interactive content, but it seems most people are happier to use a proper web browser to do ecommerce type stuff.

Maybe if Sky's box ultimately morphs into a true Smart TV platform with a decent UI, we might start seeing some good interactive services. But, as it stands, it's pretty limited. Very much an early 2000s platform that's starting to show its age.

The On-demand services will definitely get a lot more interest though.

bido

Squ wrote: »

Again, how?

Have multiroom for years with no land line connected.to either the sky box or the multiroom box. don't pay any extra. and we have a land line in the house.

Squ

bido wrote: »

Have multiroom for years with no land line connected.to either the sky box or the multiroom box. don't pay any extra. and we have a land line in the house.

I know that much from your last post.
With sky insisting on a land line prior to setting up multi room, i was asking how you're managing it.

Especially with the rolly eyes icon you used, making out that its obvious or something?

kristian12

We have Sky+ and 3 multiroom boxes and they've never been connected to a landline. When the engineer fitted them we just said we had a line being put in in a couple of weeks, he said fine and made the phone call to activate the cards off his mobile. We've since had a landline put in but never connected it to any of the boxes, a few months ago the sky engineer working next door activated their cards through my landline without any problems.

cgarvey

The Sky T&C for Multiroom clearly state that all boxes (main box + any subsidised subscription boxes) must be connected to the same landline for the duration of the contract. You're liable for the full subscription cost (for each additional/subsidised box) if that is not the case.

What happens in reality is that in some cases, Sky will write to you to demand you rectify the situation, and in some cases they won't bother. I've not read any case where Sky started charging full subs without prior written notice (but that doesn't mean they won't, or that you're not liable).

To get Multiroom installed (without a landline) seems to be a lot trickier these days. Some smaller, independent installers seem to be still able to do this up until about a year ago. After that, I haven't seen much mention of it still being possible.

So if you can get an installer to install without a landline (e.g. activating them from his home/office), and if you think it's an acceptable risk to be in breach of the T&C, and if Sky don't warn you, you should be able to get Multiroom without a landline. However, that's a lot of ifs, and you are definitely in breach of your contract with Sky.

helimachoptor

A lot has changed now, the manual activation of cards has to go through numerous hoops before getting approved and in MR installs, the dial back needs to be seen from all the boxes for them to do it in a lot of cases.