How To Cancel My Sky TV/Phone/Broadband

rreeve

For the last couple of months my SKY broadband has been unbelievably slow. I've spoke to their technical dept and they say it's because of my area. They SKY advisor said my package is upto 25mb/s download speed but I am only getting 1.9mb/s which is shockingly bad and nowhere near their advertised speeds.
Today I rang up to cancel my contract but again they wanted to hand me over to tech support which hasn't been able to help in the past. After I put the phone down, I got an email from sky saying they had given me a 10% discount on one of their TV bundles and they had started a new contract from today. I am so angry that they have tried to tie me into another contract because I wanted to cancel.
When I spoke with them earlier, they said my original contract expires in July 2016 and my cancellation fee would be £195. It was my partner who originally bought the package from sky and I believe she was miss-sold the package because broadband speeds were not explained to her, she believed 'unlimited broadband' meant unlimited broadband because she didn't understand anything about speeds.
I am disgusted with the service and the support we have received and I refuse to pay the £195 to cancel our contract because they haven't provided a service that is anywhere near what they advertised. 1.9mb/s is nowhere near 25mb/s so surely they can't reasonably blame this on the area and still advertise the service as 25mb/s.

I plan to switch to Virgin Media now because their service is so much better than SKY but I'd like some advice on how to deal with SKY?

Could/would virgin media help me with this in any way?

What would I need to do to cancel SKY and fight them on their £195 cancellation fee?

Any help/advice on this matter would be much appreciated.

JJ_Egan

VM is a totally separate cabling to the BT OR services .

I see no reason why you cannot cancel and pay the contract off .

The service is advertised as UP TO though their is some form of minimum service speed that allows a contract to be mutually cancelled within the first 1 or 3 months of the contract .

Can i guess that you are measuring speed over WiFi instead of via ethernet cable connected to the master socket .
Are you able to log in to the router ??
and post line stats .

jem16

rreeve wrote: »

They SKY advisor said my package is upto 25mb/s download speed but I am only getting 1.9mb/s which is shockingly bad and nowhere near their advertised speeds.

I'm not aware of any Sky package that offers 25mb. If it's adsl and not fibre then it's UP TO 17mb. These speeds are never guaranteed and are based on your distance from the exchange. The closer you are the higher the speed you can get.

So we would need to see the stats from the router to see what speed you are capable of getting as sometimes your own internal wiring can be lowering the speeds.

After I put the phone down, I got an email from sky saying they had given me a 10% discount on one of their TV bundles and they had started a new contract from today. I am so angry that they have tried to tie me into another contract because I wanted to cancel.

Well you should certainly complain about that if that happened.

It was my partner who originally bought the package from sky and I believe she was miss-sold the package because broadband speeds were not explained to her, she believed 'unlimited broadband' meant unlimited broadband because she didn't understand anything about speeds.

How was the package bought? Did she speak to anyone or was it ordered online? Everything online says UP TO for speeds so it's not Sky's fault that your partner didn't find out what she was buying. If it was over the phone can you be sure that the speed wasn't explained to her?

Could/would virgin media help me with this in any way?

No they wouldn't help you with Sky.

What would I need to do to cancel SKY and fight them on their £195 cancellation fee?

That depends what that cancellation fee is for. The TV and LR/BB contracts are separate. At the moment you can get out of the LR/BB because of the recently announced price rises to the LR and call packages. As it affects you, you can leave with no penalty.

However your TV contract is not affected so you cannot leave that without a penalty.

You could always take out LR/BB with Virgin and leave the TV with Sky just now.

teddysmum

I'm surprised that they dealt with you, when the contract is in your partner's name.


I had vaguely similar problem,yesterday, when a call centre person sent an email,luckily while I was still speaking to her, saying I had accepted something I had not.


I told her I had said I would consider the offer and certainly had not accepted, then rang back to Accounts, who put me through to someone who knew what they were doing and gave me a very good offer.(I was, however, at the end of my minimum term)

jem16

teddysmum wrote: »

I'm surprised that they dealt with you, when the contract is in your partner's name.

Sky will deal with anyone who has the password for the account.

The only thing they will not do is cancel the whole account without speaking to the actual account holder. However they will do everything else.

teddysmum

I've always found one of the first questions, after address details to be 'Are you the account holder ?' .

rreeve

Just a quick update with my issue.
I complained about the telephone conversation I had yesterday with SKY and I got a phone call from them at 8 o'clock last night.
The women who called was fantastic. She apologised for the problems we've been having and was very understanding about the slow speeds we receive in our area. I was really surprised because she made us exempt from the early termination fee for our whole package and said as soon as we have set up our new package with Virgin Media then I should call her and she will close our account and even we can even keep our phone number.
They couldn't have been more helpful and they resolved our complaint. I never expected them to be so accommodating, particularly making us exempt from all early contract termination fee's.

Mister_G

Perhaps their appearance on Watchdog last night had something to do with it?

jem16

rreeve wrote: »

They couldn't have been more helpful and they resolved our complaint. I never expected them to be so accommodating, particularly making us exempt from all early contract termination fee's.

Sounds like you had a phone call from their executive team. They are always able to do what the normal CS can't.

[Deleted User]

Could you not cancel the Sky phone and broadband penalty free now because of the increase in prices? That's what we've done and they cannot stop you from leaving mid-contract and cannot charge you a cancellation fee for doing so.
It wouldn't cancel your TV package though, just the phone and broadband. If you wanted to keep your number then you would have to approach another company first before cancelling and then they would transfer the number across?
Anyone else think this is a good idea? Hopefully someone else can confirm this to you for peace of mind, but if they're not going to let you leave because of BB speed, then leave penalty free because of the increase in line rental and call charges instead!
Hope this helps x

[Deleted User]

Sorry, just re-read your post above and it seems you have managed to get it sorted, so that's fab news! x