Sky with a Magnet phone line

Magnet use VoIP for their phone service, so this will not work with fax machines or Sky Digital boxes.

Therefore you can get a single Sky Digital Box (with an extra €100 charge for no phone line). but you can't get a mirror sub (Second box).

Of course there is nothing stopping you from using a FTA box for other rooms.

Magnets TV service is completely different. It is delivered via IPTV technology over DSL (phone line). The line up of channels is much smaller then Sky or NTL and from reports, the picture and sound quality is inferior to both Sky and NTL, it has a lot of pixelation, the EPG is awful and doesn't work most of the time, the TV service uses the bandwidth of the internet service (therefore reducing quality of BB) and you can forget about getting multi room as it doesn't scale.

Honestly Sky is going to have to do something about this. They are artifically limiting their market size.

In the last 12 months Eircoms has lost about 10% of phone lines, mostly to people with mobiles. Recently I was looking for a new house mate, a lot of people who called were amazed that we had a phone line and complained that they didn't want to pay there share of the rent on it as they already had a mobile (whoa, whoa, etc.).

Lack of phone lines is particularly true for young affluent people, exactly the target demographic for Sky. NTL have potentially the same problem with it's digital service, yet they don't put this restriction on their customers. They just recognise that it is part of the cost of doing business and that most people won't abuse it.

NTL Digital boxes don't include DOCSIS so they currently have no way to "phone home" and NTL boxes aren't restricted to any particular cable segment. So with NTL you can basically take your box anywhere that digital works, they just ignore the whole problem, they have obviously decided that not many people will actually abuse it and that any abuse is cheaper then going for expensive work arounds like requiring a phone line, GPS, etc.

I honestly believe that NTL have made the right decision here and Sky has made the wrong decision. Phone line use is decreasing at a massive rate and will only continue to decrease as line rental cost goes up while mobile costs drop [1]. Sky are only hurting themselves, eventually the cost of lost customers will out weight the cost of people abusing the system (they could always limit the number of Sub's orderable per house).

If 10% of homes don't have a phone line, that is 10% of people who can't get Sky+ or multiroom, I can guarantee that by next year at least 20% of homes won't have a phone line.

Another possible solution for Sky would be to include WiFI modules in the Sky boxes. You could get the Sky boxes to talk to one another via WiFI to ensure that they are within 20 metres of one another etc. You could also do other interesting things with WiFi, such as:

1) Stream recorded shows from a Sky+ box to a standard box (or another Sky+ box).

2) If you have two Sky+ boxes, they could talk to one another to ensure that they don't record the same show twice.

3) Control all your Sky+ boxes from any Sky box in your house.

4) Connect to BB for interactive services, VoD, programme Sky+ via BB, etc.

5) Stream Radio, Music TV channels to Sky Gnome (which BTW already uses WiFi, so Sky already know how to do this).

Sorry, quick correction, Sky Gnome uses an FM transmitter, however it could use WiFi.
Hell, they could even go further and develop a Tablet PC type devices with WiFi to stream shows and Sky+ content around the house. Good for the kids and watching TV from bed.

And remember, a WiFi module is really cheap, my DS that cost €150 has one, so I think they could afford to put one in a Sky box.

See all it takes is some lateral thinking, think different.

[1] o2 have a great deal were for €35 per month you get 2000 offpeak minutes (about 33 hours) a month to landlines and o2 phones. This is a very tempting telephone line replacement option.

watty wrote:

The key does not need broken, that is why the system is easy to circumvent. just copy all the traffic on to a VPN over Internet and back again. Only one person needs to know how to do it and everyone can do it. You don't actually need to know what any of the traffic means.

No, this simply wouldn't work, you can't simply grab 802.11 traffic and shunt it over VPN. You would need to break the WPA security first and then you could shunt the TCP/IP traffic.

WPA with a strong key has never been broken, it is a good secure security system.

There are also options in the 802.11 and WPA specs to disallow bridging and repeating.

What you are saying is simply not do able.

The interference problems of WiFi can also be easily bypassed.