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GOOD NEWS ON the job front as Sky’s new wholesale deal with BT Ireland will see the creation of 900 jobs in Ireland this year.
Sky will be launching its Sky Talk and Sky Broadband services across the country later in the year and will open a dedicated customer contact care centre for Irish customers at Burlington Plaza in Dublin.
Sky said the new Irish operation will see its workforce increase by 900 over the next 18 months and recruitment is already under way.
The new services will now allow existing Sky customers in Ireland to unite their television services with a range of telephone and broadband packages from Sky.
JD Buckley, Managing Director of Sky Ireland, commented: “We’re confident of delivering the right products at the right prices so customers have a real alternative to the incumbent services they’ve been used to.”
Sky said Customers will be able to pre-register for broadband and talk in due course and prices will be confirmed in coming months.
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Bout bloody time.
At least there it will drive the price down..
Yes, Sky tv is an excellent service and certainly look forward to their introduction of broadband. Oh to be able to tell those useless bas*###s in Eircom to take a flying…….
Oh man I’ve been waiting for this… Bout bloody time is right!
…and in a less selfish note, I’m glad to hear of the 900 new jobs!
Bye Bye shitty NBS broadband from 3.
Nope, Sky will be using Eircoms existing bitstream services, so if you can’t get DSL now you still won’t be able to get DSL from Sky.
@ Barry (2nd one!): :-( Oh well, that few seconds of hope re ditching 3 and their rubbish broadband was nice while it lasted.
@ryan… Digiweb! 8gb for 40yoyo and is available most parts (I think)
Barry I don’t know where you live but I’ve got an O2 hotshot which I’ve had for about 6 months and have never had an issue! Speed is between 3 and 10 depending on what time you’re using and it’s €16.50 a month! Left Eircom as for 45 a month they could only offer 1mb speed.
Ted Carroll, “Mobile Broadband” is extremely hit and miss.
Just because it works for you doesn’t mean its perfect for others, it all depends on the amount of users on each mast. the more users the more the service degrades and slows and the mobile company can’t control this or improve it in the same way as they can with DSL as the amount of users can change at anytime (where as dsl is limited to a fixed amount of lines connected).
So if your service works fantastic somebody connected to the next mobile mast say 5miles away could have an awful unusable service. This is a problem that affects all so called “mobile broadband” company’s.
Ah thanks Barry! I was worried getting it but I guess I’ve been one of the lucky ones so far!
This is going to hurt UPC, though I find their service pretty good so I won’t be leaving them unless Sky offer something exceptional.
Sky TV and UPC for the phone and broadband. Best of both worlds!
Yeh, that’s my current setup, top notch! Though I’d like to see Sky’s Anytime + introduced in Ireland, looks good too.
Skys anytime plus is available in Ireland, just connect your EThernet cable to your box from your internet modem and ring Sky and they’ll send in the signal
Oh god I think I agree with Tory boy, I feel a little dirty right now!
I cant see this hurting UPC to be honest, Sky ‘Eircoms’ broadband is woeful in comparison to UPCs 30-100Mb offering. You would want to be some tool to want to downgrade your broadband package just to get skys tv offerings coupled with a poor broadband offering. But yeah competition is welcome to be fair and maybe pricing impacts could follow
@ Aaron, Are you sure? I enquired about a month ago and they said it’s not available in ROI. Do you have it ?
I left Sky in 2005. Too expensive. They continued inflating the price in 2007 onwards.
Regonald I’ve been with Sky since 2002. I left NTL/Chorus for them as Chorus’ service and support was rubbish. I’ve being paying the same price for Sky since then.
Why was yours increasing
Problem they will have is that the phone line infrastructure is do shoddy that they will have to offer some really cheap as chips prices to pull people away from UPC’s far superior net package.
Exactly, Sky will be stuck using eircom wholesales bit-stream product which is the exact same product digiweb, vodafone, eircom, utv etc all use to provide DSL in Ireland.
Ireland also doesn’t have a LLU network like Sky have in the UK and they are never going to invest the sort of money needed to built a LLU network like they have in the UK as Eircom and toothless Comreg have made sure that bus is long long gone. (it needed to start happening 10 years ago).
People are expecting Sky to save them from Eircom and Three’s so called “Mobile Broadband” and sadly thats just not going to happen.
Altho I do live in the one estate in Dublin with the fibre optic phone lines so I wonder…
The likes of Dublin will of course get a better service but these area’s are already saturated by the likes of Digiweb, Magnet and UPC and again Sky would still have a alot of work to compete with UPC’s 100MB packages.
To be honest eircom in Dublin is a joke too, top speed of 8mb, which if you do a speed test it gets nowhere near, expensive and poor equipment given out. I just am lucky to live in one of the two fibre test estates (I think the other weirdly is in Wexford town?) where themselves and magnet are offering 100mb+ broadband, it just costs a bomb in comparison to UPC. I was just wondering aloud if sky might be able to get in on the act there and bring down the price of it in a bundle lol.
I thought they would be cable to utilise their existing satellite infrastructure.
If its just the existing Eircom, then it’s back to steam powered internet. Bummer.
Satelite broadband is crap in general plus as far as I’m aware the Astra sat they use for tele doesn’t do the Internet
more importantly is bang babes going to be upgraded to HD?
I remember working for sky and the amount of customers who were looking for broadband was high on demand. Good to hear its finally coming to ireland.
FREESAT all the way. sky and upc are rip off. 95% of what you want to watch is available free
Premiership football and sky Atlantic. Freesat is great tho and I have one of their boxes in the bedroom running off my sky satelite.
premiership football you have to pay extra for on top of your normal subscription, and as for Sky Atlantic, that’s just HBO and you can download episodes on tinternet.
Why do you think sky hide all the BBC, ITV channels in services and don’t allow you the EPG or record them (unless that’s changed since I stopped using them)
Still you have to have sky to watch the footy, that’s why I have it, sky Atlantic is a nice bonus, much prefer watching tele on my box to my computer. All the bbcs and c4s are on the epg only itv needs to be manually tuned and that doesn’t bother me in the slightest seeing as its a steaming pile of that I only use for champions league.
Who in this day in age watches UTV, TV3, RTE, CH4 and so?? There’s only so much xfactor or big brother one cant watch, those stations are well outdated!
@Aaron, Channels you are listing there are Irish channels available free on soarview. Freesat is BBC 1 – 4, ITV 1-4, More4, E4, USA, CBS, Channel 5, film 4 and loads more. Plus you get around 5HD channels. Plenty of viewing on freesat, nearly all channels have the +1 which to be honest I always seem to turn on the TV and end up watching programs on +1… BBC are covering the Olympic over 24 channels for free as well as through the red button.
when I was with sky, I noted all the programs that we watch as a family and at one point we went 3 days of watching programs that were available for free, that was enough for me. I would recommend it to anyone, take note of what you watch and then see if its available free. you’ll be surprised. unless your into your football or a mad movie buff, then they have you by the balls…. !!!
Sky anytime plus is not available in ireland yet only up north and will be available soon I’m an engineer for them
Yeah I’ve been in touch myself and was told that they hope to have it available here real soon. I’m delighted I’ll also be switching to sky for my phone and Internet. They are a fantastic company to deal with…. with top class customer service personal both online and over the phone. One thing that always drives me mad with the likes of UPC is the 30 min “please stay on the line your call is important to us” well bleedin pick up the phone then!!!! Anyway never got that with sky anytime you’ve an issue they answer the phone very quickly.
“Recruitment is already underway” link is broken (12:18pm)
Thanks Niall, the link should work now. It will bring you to their ‘work for Sky’ page and you can search vacancies there.
That evil Murdoch creating jobs and what not :P
Rupert Murdoch is very much a minority shareholder in sky these days, plus the fact that even if he employed everyone on the planet in humanitarian pursuits he would still make Lex Luther look like a good guy!
What’s a what not?
Have to say Sky are the dogs bollox, never a glitch, top notch service a complete contrast to UPC jokers – 90 minute wait to speak to a human being pish takers.
here, here
Or even there, there
Should fixed line broadband be rolled out nationwide like electricity in the 50′s? Could the journal do that poll?!
Smart economy would really take off, all the farmers would be on facebook
Would be great, of course it should be fibre but it would cost likely in the billions.
Instead we are all stuck paying eircom 26e a month for the pleasure of a PSTN line (just a plain old phone line) regardless of if we actually want to make calls or not, you have no other real choice in the vast majority of Ireland if you want DSL (unless you can get unbundled services like from Magnet etc but thats really only in citys).
Sky broadband is really bad on the uk supposedly. Great to see condition though we need more of it in all sectors.
Well it was, isn’t so much anymore. When it came out around 2006ish had the same problem they will have here, BTs network was out of date and limiting it. Since BT have modernised most of their network it has become a really good product, not on a par with cable but still very good and much much cheaper
Sky Broadband will still be limited to using the same crappy lines laid down by Eircom.
I have recently contacted Sky (inquiring about it) and they confirmed to me that they will NOT be able to give the speeds that are currently available to countries elsewhere – where the lines are of much better quality and that includes England.
For the foreseeable future, the bulk of the country is stuck using the same far out of date lines which really only slower speeds and a lot of line degradation.
Say “Thank you Eircom” !!!
Anyone know where I can get a dodgy box?
BT remain one of eircom’s largest wholesale (reselling their services over eircom phone lines) and I’m sure have entered into this deal with Sky knowing that the fibre rollout by eircom will leave them able to offer a very strong triple play package to the Irish market.
It will be very interesting to see if Comreg will regulate the fibre market as heavily as the PSTN, seeing as how UPC are now verging on being the SMP, and look for it to be offered to other competitors as an unbundled (sic) product.
sky will be offering broadband through the dish so what have lines got to do with anything…!!!
No they won;t, satellite broadband is next to useless and isn’t very cost affective or good for such services as online gaming, voip….basically anything that requires a decent upload speed.
Just because Sky use sat for tv doesn’t in anyway mean that they’ll be using it for Broadband.
oh…ok wasn’t aware how useless the sat broadband was…. was only going by the sky guy that was on radio this evening… he was saying that they would be offering it through sat dishes and some deal with BT Ireland…. whom i thought was now vodafone at home! used to have internet with BT Ireland… then it changed to Vodafone at home…
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