After giving up with Tiscali, who have been our ISP for a few years, we made the change to Sky Broadband.

It’s a funny story actually. I contacted Tiscali in March some time, requesting a connection upgrade. We were paying £15/month for an unlimited 1Mb connection. I noticed they were no longer offering that broadband package, but were instead offering an unlimited 8Mb connection for the same price, which made me feel as if we’d missed out on a connection upgrade. I was aware that we are living too far away from the exchange to receive a fast internet connection, but most line tests returned that we could receive up to a 3Mb connection.

Two months passed since the request for the connection upgrade, with little contact from Tiscali. It was only supposed to take 15 days. Eventually I heard from them saying that there was a problem with our account, and the transfer had been put on hold.

Being quite irritated, I finally decided to call the cancellations line and request the MAC code. I was a little hesitant to do this because I had heard that Tiscali often don’t release the MAC code, and I didn’t want to spend a long time offline, going through the disconnection and reconnection process with BT. However, I spoke to a delightful English woman who was very helpful, and after dribbling through the typical “Oh we can improve that now for you, and offer you this”, she got everything sorted very quickly. Our MAC code was e-mailed to us not very long after, and two weeks later we are connected to Sky Broadband.

I was unsure whether to go with Sky, as they’re one of the few ISPs who require you to use their own networking hardware. I am rather fond of the Netgear DG834GT that I usually use, and didn’t want to use their hardware. However, they were the cheapest, fastest option, and after a little research, it turned out that they use that exact model with their connection, which I was very pleased about.

When the router came in the post, roughly 5 days after we requested the transfer, I opened the box to see a horrible grey SAGEM box. Not what I was expecting. Apparently the Netgear routers were the version 1 Sky routers, and the SAGEM ones are version 2. Anyway, when the connection had been transfered I plugged it in and got it running rather smoothly, which was very surprising. The UI isn’t as nice as the one you find on the Netgear routers, but as a product, it seems to be working rather well so far.

So, I now have a 16Mb unlimited connection. We can only actually receive a 3Mb connection right now, but it only costs £10/month and I wanted the unlimited package. Hopefully as the exchange gets upgraded I will benefit from a faster speed, we’ll see. Currently I am very happy with it though. My transfer speeds both up and down have tripled, and I don’t have to deal with such a terrible technical support team anymore.