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!

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!

lol….. Oh there’s always one that lowers the tone!!! hehe.

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

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 ?

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.

Thanks Niall, the link should work now. It will bring you to their ‘work for Sky’ page and you can search vacancies there.

here, here

Or even there, there

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).

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…. !!!

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

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

i have to agree regonald sky far too expensive im with upc better picture similar channels extremely fast broadband all cheaper than i was paying sky

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?

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…