sky broadband/ own N router use

Paulicci

I Have had sky tv for over 25 years, A few months ago I changed to sky broad band and then added their phone service for the full package.
Today, we bought an N router for faster connection speeds, especially as I have a small notebook with N compatibility.
My son, who is usually good at sorting these things out, could not get it to work so he phoned the sky helpline.
We were amazed to be told that sky will not allow you to use any other router but the one they provide and as they have not advanced to the N router yet, I am supposed to be satisfied with what they give me. There is supposed to be a way round it but at your own peril!!!!!!!!!!!
Incidently, their router is supposed to run at 108 mbps, but it ACTUALLY runs at 54mbps.
Al excuses for the slowness of any of the 3 laptops in my home won;t wash, especially the one about how near/far you are from the telephone exchange because I live 6 doors away from it.
Just another instance of my civil liberties being abused.
I am fuming. I was not told any of this when I signed up

LeeSouthEast

Ignoring your ranting parts, you just need to change the VCI/VPI (iirc) to Sky. I've no idea what this is any more, but it should be available from a cursory google search.

macman

Since your landline (on a Sky LLU service) will run at no more than (a theoretical) 20Mbps, a router that runs at 108Mbps would be fairly pointless, unless you are shifting large video files or similar around your network.
You've got this completely wrong, you can use whatever router you like ((it's in your home, after all), but Sky will only support the models of router that they themselves supply. This is standard practice with most ISP's these days, they can't know the interface for every router on the market.
Once you've set it up it will be fine, but if you need support you will need to go elsewhere than Sky.

penrhyn

OP read the terms and conditions and you will see that Sky require you to use their router.
The username and password are stored in the routers firmware.
You can extract it to use your own at your own risk.

Do you want to know more?

http://www.skyuser.co.uk/forum/extracting-sky-router-passwords/

macman

penrhyn, that's very interesting, not aware of any other ISP's who have this in their T&C's. But in practice, how can they possibly enforce this? And why would they want to?

penrhyn

Probably built into Skys' DNA, they like to control everything.
It also makes their routers useless if you move away from Sky, unless you are techy enough to be able to flash them.

macman

But no way to detect if you are using a non-approved router on a Sky connection?

kwikbreaks

macman wrote: »

But no way to detect if you are using a non-approved router on a Sky connection?

There would be on Sky LLU as the DSLAM is theirs. That said I have never ever seen a post anywhere saying that Sky were moaning about somebody using a non Sky supplied router.