Sky not working with Phone LIne

The Ayatolla

A friend of mine has "Airwave" broadband and phone, which works via an aerial on the roof of his house. He's living in a rural area.

He's trying to get Sky Multiroom, but the existing box he has can't communicate via the phone connection on Airwave.

He has the phone port connected to the phone connection of the Airwave modem/router, but it refuses to "talk" to Sky so to speak.

I've done a bit of googling and found that its due to Airwave having a "digital" phone system.

Is there any way around this so that I can get the Sky box connected via phone line? I've tried ordering box office events / movies and it simply won't work.

Any help appreciated.

Cantona's Collars

You don't need a phoneline to order box office,all you need to do is ring Sky.

cgarvey

It all depends on the phone system (and, if VoIP, the codecs being used). For example Docsis-based systems (UPC, Digiweb Metro) tend to just about work with the Sky modem (which is a very basic modem that'll happily work at slow speeds). However true VoIP/digital systems (like, say, BlueFace) won't (and no amount of coaxing will make it!).

So, first I'd suggest a call to Airwave to see if sending faxes is supported, even unofficially. If faxing is supported, the you'll probably be able to get the Sky box(es) talking, even if it means having to move them to right beside the modem/router.

It doesn't look good, though!

Solair

Sky's service uses a traditional dial-up 56kbps analogue modem.

Your phone line is being provided by VoIP. Some of these services are optimised to get the best voice quality out of a relatively low bandwidth connection by using various compression algorithms. While these will sound fine to your ear, they are actually handling the signal quite differently to a normal phone line which uses a fairly simple method of digitally encoding a signal.

Some VoIP services that aren't very compressed, e.g. UPC or Smart Telecom will generally pass modem traffic without an issue, but others won't.

So, basically there's nothing you can do other than ring Sky and tell them you have a VoIP phone line that doesn't seem to be compatible with their modem.

The Ayatolla

Thanks for the advice folks