Cancelling Sky before it's even begun

pjcampbell

Hi all, just after a bit of help, if anyone has any advice as I'm pretty clueless when it comes to everything.
I ordered Sky just over a couple of weeks ago, and just had an engineer turn up at my flat over the weekend and has said he can't complete the installation as the dish needs to be "earthed" for Sky Q to run. Puzzled as to why he couldn't just take care of this himself being a Sky engineer, I just said OK.
We have a communal dish, and the engineer said to contact the council to take care of this, then reschedule an appointment to install.
I phoned the council this morning, and they've said they won't do it, and that I'd have to get my own electrician in to do it.
Has anyone had experience of this before? Am I right in assuming I can cancel with no strings attached, as my service hasn't begun yet?
Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any advice.

Neil_Jones

Communal aerials are the responsibility of whoever installed them, in council properties this will usually be the council (who typically farm these things out to somebody else).

So the alternatives are: If the council won't upgrade the communual Sky dish system for Q, you may be able to put your own dish up if you live relatively close to the ground and there is a spot on the wall facing the right direction that a dish can be bolted to. Strictly speaking you should really get planning permission for these but in a lot of areas people just stick them up regardless. A block not far from where I live has a collection of six independent dishes all sitting next to each other in a neat little arrangement in the middle front of the block + a communal one on the side. They are supposed to come down when a communal goes up but they rarely do.

If you live more than about three floors up you may be out of luck as to your own dish (due to working at height) so the alternative in that case may be to just either get badgering the council to upgrade the communal dish or find another solution - like NowTV or Virgin or similar.

Get back in touch with Sky and cancel it, explain the situation, see if they can find a workaround for you (which may involve as above a separate dish) and go from there.