Tag Archives: sky

Cutting the Cord and Dropping the Dish: Full Fibre Broadband Upgrade



As regular readers of GNC will recall from the first episode, I need to upgrade my current broadband connection to something faster in order to move from Sky TV to Freeview and streaming. My existing data connection is provided via an old-school copper telephone line and maxes out at around 30 Mb/s. This isn’t much better than the minimum needed to stream 4K UHD, so with two gaming children in the household, an upgrade is definitely needed. It will help considerably on those days when both my wife and I are working from home and need to be on Teams calls.

Fortunately, full fibre connections have been advertised for my neighbourhood so for relatively little additional money (extra £8), I’m able to go from 30 Mb/s to 500 Mb/s. Order placed!

And today’s the day that I get that new connection. I’m not too sure how it’s going to work and how the fibre connection will be made as it’s all underground. I’m hoping that there won’t be too much digging up the path or drilling holes in walls (spoiler alert: there isn’t).

“J” from BT Openreach turned up right on time and got to work. On opening up the master socket (that’s where the phone line comes into the house) in my hallway, he was able to run a fish wire through a duct from my house back to a junction box. You can see the yellow wire disappearing down the duct in the picture. No digging or drilling required at all but the weather was terrible – I did feel sorry for him when he was out in the rain.

The fibre was then pulled back from the box to the hall, where J fitted a new termination unit in the place of the master socket. He then did a bit of configuration work and collaboration with colleagues to turn the connection on. By the way, I make no apologies for the wallpaper.

After that, it was simply a case of getting a new modem / router out of the box and plugging it in. Total downtime was about an hour. Great job by J.

Inevitably, I had to enter the new password for the wireless network onto all my devices to get back online – I didn’t know I had so many – and I use Devolo’s GigaGate bridge system to deliver high speed connections round the house to devices that think they have a wired connection. Even though it’s about 7 years old now, it still works really well.

I’ve been running a few speed tests and I’m getting the advertised 500 Mb/s. When I started in business back in the 1990s, the whole office ran off a 2 Mb/s network and now I have 500 Mb/s to my home. How times have changed.

Streaming apps on my TVs are definitely snappier when starting programmes. So far, it’s all looking good and the journey away from Sky TV seems well in hand. Next up is some new hardware.


Cutting the Cord and Dropping the Dish



After a few months of prevarication, I’ve decided to cut the cord and leave Sky TV. As Sky provides broadcast services via satellite, it’s perhaps more appropriate to describe it as “dropping the dish” but the point is the same. After nearly 25 years as a subscriber, I’m leaving Sky to rely on terrestrial broadcasting and streaming services.

For those unfamiliar with the UK’s TV services, there are broadly three ways to receive TV channels. There’s the digital terrestrial broadcast service known as Freeview that’s received via aerial, which offers channels provided mainly by BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. Then there’s Sky which transmits (mostly) via satellite, offering the previous channels plus a whole pile of its own content including dedicated film and sports channels. Bringing up the rear is Virgin Media, which uses cable for its offering which is similar to Sky.

Anyone who watches TV in the UK has to pay £169.50 per household for a TV Licence. This is a tax that funds public service broadcasting like the BBC. It doesn’t matter how you watch programmes or if you only watch subscription channels, you still have to pay for a TV Licence. In my opinion, it is a good thing.

Virgin and Sky both offer DVR services but Sky offers Sky Q, a clever system that provides a mesh Wi-Fi network that uses TV boxes as access points. I have to say that it works well, allowing me to watch programmes recorded on the main DVR at TVs throughout the house while my children game away on their PCs and PlayStations. This has been one of the main reasons to stay with Sky but it’s reached a tipping point that I can’t ignore.

The decision to move away from Sky TV was driven by a couple of reasons:

  • The annual bill for Sky TV was nearly GB£900 – about £73 per month – and I was out of any contract lock-in.
  • I’m paying for subscriptions for some streaming services, e.g. Disney+, Amazon Prime Video.
  • Relatively few programmes were Sky exclusives.
  • All TVs at home are smart TVs or have Rokus.
  • Children now spend time gaming or watching social media online rather than broadcast TV.
  • Availability of full fibre connection to the home.

The plan is to:

  • Cancel the Sky TV package – done.
  • Upgrade to a 500 Mb/s fibre connection – installation is coming soon.
  • Buy a Freeview recorder from Panasonic, Humax or Manhattan. I’m still researching the best option.
  • Look out for freebies, pay monthly and monitor use of streaming services. Cancel if they’re not being used.

Cancelling Sky TV required persistence as they tried to tempt me with all kinds of offers. I did consider Sky Stream, which is their IP offering, but there weren’t really any savings to be made. All that changes is the delivery mechanism from satellite dish to broadband/fibre. If you are in the same situation as me, keep politely powering through when you’re on with the service agent.

Right now, I’m in the 30 days notice period so I’m scrambling to finish any recording programmes on the Sky box. Technicians are coming in a few days time to upgrade the connection to full fibre. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes as I’m not sure how they’re going to bring the cable in as everything is under ground here and they can’t simply drop a cable from an overhead line.

My plan is to write a series of articles, this being part 1. I’m expecting the upgrade to fibre and selection of the Freeview recorder to be the next in line, with a final opinion piece to report how well it’s gone overall. Stay tuned!


The Internet is a Utility



Router and CablesLast week, I moved to a new Internet Service Provider (ISP). Nothing particularly unusual about that except that I had been with my old ISP, Demon, for nearly twenty years. That’s almost the whole of the my adult life and I’m sure it’s the longest customer relationship I’ve had. To be quite clear, I didn’t leave Demon as a dissatisfied customer and on the contrary, I would recommend them to anyone. So why did I leave?

To answer that, we’ll have to take a little trip down memory lane. Back in the early 90s, the 486DX2 was the CPU of choice, 8 MB was a lot of RAM, 120 MB hard drives were huge and dial-up modems were specialist items. JANET, the UK’s university network was the closest thing to the Internet, and it was email, ftp, telnet, Usenet and gopher. I imagine that some readers will be thinking, “gopher?” Never heard of that.

In 1992 and in an early example of crowdsourcing, Demon ISP was setup by persuading 200 people to pay in advance for a year’s dial-up access. I wasn’t part of that group but after publicity in the leading UK computer magazine at the time, Personal Computer World, I signed up for their £10 a month dial-up service. You had to buy your own modem in those days – no freebie wireless router – but it came with unlimited email addresses, 10 MB of ftp space and Usenet newsgroups.

Demon provided their own email package called Turnpike as this was all pre-Outlook, and a certain level of skill was needed just to get on-line. The connection software was a command line program called KA9Q that was originally amateur radio software. Winsock fortunately arrived shortly afterwards, which made life considerably easier with Windows 3.

One of the great things about Demon in the early days was that the support staff were technical folk too and quickly got the measure of the caller. If you said to them that you were having problems with DNS resolving, they’d understand that you had a reasonable grasp of the problem and work with you, rather than blindly follow the procedure written in the training manual.

Since then there have been many changes in the world of technology, not least the arrival of ADSL broadband, which single-handedly changed the web from geek toy to consumer product. In the end, two things conspired against Demon. The first was free web email such Gmail and Hotmail which meant that I no longer needed my ISP to provide me with an email address. The second was video-on-demand which had the twin impacts of volume and speed. My new ISP, Sky, offers twice the speed of Demon and no data caps for less money. Bit of a no brainer, as they say.

Demon provided a great technical service for geeks 20 years ago, but as the web has become a consumer product, the need for technical features such as ftp space has faded. All that is needed is the connection. The Internet has become a utility like water, gas and electricity, always there and always ready. No understanding of the technology is needed to use it, just as turning on a light doesn’t need knowledge of volts and amps.

I’ve no doubt that Demon has a successful future working with business but I think that the future of the independent ISP in the consumer space is bleak. People will choose consumer brands linked to utilities or telcos – Sky, BT, Virgin, Orange – and get one bill for multiple services at a reduced price…as I did.

Routers and Cables 2” image courtesy of BigStock.


Xbox Boosts On-Demand in the UK



Earlier in the week, Microsoft gave the Xbox a big push in the race for HDMI 1 with Steve Ballmer announcing Xbox TV and partnerships with over 40 content providers. Jeffrey Powers has already covered the main announcement on GNC but I wanted to add a little bit of UK spin.

In the UK, additional programming boxes such as the Roku, Boxee or Apple TV are very rare. Most of my friends would enjoy their gadgets and technology but I don’t know a single one of them who has an extra box. However, many of them would have a games console and there’s a fairly even spread of Xboxes, Playstations and Wiis. Consequently it’s no surprise that the race to provide on-demand content is taking place on the consoles.

Most people in the UK are using the availability of on-line TV to catch up with programmes they missed when they were originally broadcast. What typically happens is that you go into work and some says, “Did you see…..last night? It was brilliant” and you watch the programme through the various free on-line services. The BBC’s iPlayer is very popular.

Reviewing Microsoft’s press release, here are the organisations that will provide on-demand content available in the UK on the Xbox. I’ve ignored the standard social networking sites, such as Facebook and YouTube, but have added the organisation’s background so that non-UK residents can get a feel for what’s happening.

  • BBC – Terrestrial broadcaster
  • Channel 4 – Terrestrial broadcaster
  • Channel 5 – Terrestrial broadcaster
  • BSkyB – Satellite broadcaster (requires monthly subscription)
  • LOVEFiLM – On-line film rental
  • blinkbox – On-line film rental
  • Crackle – Free on-line films
  • Screenrush – Film trailers
  • Muzu.TV – Music videos
  • VEVO – Music videos
In terms of the numbers, the traditional terrestrial and satellite broadcasters have the greatest presence and there’s only one major UK broadcaster missing from the list, ITV, which is a conglomeration of regional broadcast companies.
LOVEFiLM is owned by Amazon, Crackle is a Sony property and blinkbox is 80% owned by Tesco, one of the UK’s leading supermarkets.
The challenge will be to get consumers to pay for the on-line film rentals. Here in the UK, there is lots of good free programming which was originally broadcast but is now on-line through the broadcaster’s portals via tools similar to iPlayer. It will be interesting to see how the paid-for market develops and if the games consoles are key to the transition. It’s certainly where the media companies need to be for the UK market.