Sly boxes

[yasminandrio]

I've been reading on here people saying if you don't have your sky box pluged into a live telephone line you will get charged for two subs if you have multi room, Is this true as a friend of mine has sky and multi room and has never had his pluged into the telephone line and has never been charged 2 sub or had a letter off them, could people please let me know if they have ever been charged for two subs in this way or had a letter. Thanks

[ricopicouk]

I had 3 letters over the past 3 months telling me they could not detect a phone line on my multi-room sub. They then stated that next month they would be charging me for an extra sub, which was a further ?13 odd per month.

I called them, and told them that I was not prepared to stick a phone line up stairs just to comply with their silly conditions of use, and cancelled the multiroom (no other choice really).
Anyway, when you cancel part way through the month they let you keep viewing till the end of the month is done. During this time i got a bill from sky, which had the 2nd subscription on it!

I hit the roof and called sky who promptly re creditted the ammount back to my sky account.

I would love to cancel the whole thing, but round here I dont get virgin, freeview is pants, and bt vission is naff until they sort the internet to my house with bt fibre obtic. even then its gonna cost me a fortune. I think im stuck with sly.

[abdul razaq]

I've been reading on here people saying if you don't have your sky box pluged into a live telephone line you will get charged for two subs if you have multi room, Is this true as a friend of mine has sky and multi room and has never had his pluged into the telephone line and has never been charged 2 sub or had a letter off them, could people please let me know if they have ever been charged for two subs in this way or had a letter. Thanks

Afraid its true. They can bill you...thats why this country is sick of the lack of competition in this field.

[GastonJ]

What if you don't actually have a telephone line? are Sly being biased towards people with telephone lines only?

[abdul razaq]

What if you don't actually have a telephone line? are Sly being biased towards people with telephone lines only?

Yes its positive discrimination for peeps with a land line!

[GastonJ]

I'm so glad that I never plugged my sly box into the phone *ever*. however they were quite confused as to where to plug the cable in anyway. I think at the time I had 4 ISDN's going into my house (don't ask) and he just gave me the cable and drove off

[drawflex]

the 'phone line must be plugged in' thing is part of your initial contract with sky.. when sky first rolled out it's digiboxes they were subsidised by a gang of tech-firms expecting to re-coup their outlay back by people using the phone-line-based interactive services (which have never really proved to be as lucrative as expected ) so insisted on a phone line being present before install... you used to be able to pay extra for a non-phone-line install though... dunno about now ? I used to work as an installer in the early days for sky digital , and one of the final parts of the install would be gettin the box to validate a connection to HQ via phone line... boxes can be triggered to 'call home' back to sky-hq via sat signal too . Running a phone point to behind the telly would usually mean a lot of dicking about and nasty cable runs though, so it'd be common just to lash it in loosley along the floor, for the customer to 'route neatly under the carpet' ( coil up in the cupboard ).

I'd imagine now though... it'd be more important to them to see that both boxes/viewing cards are connected to the same phone-line (house) to prove you are genuinley using them in a multi-room setup... or you could be in different houses / towns for all they know, trying to pull a blag and fiddle them out of a few quid, eg i could take out a 5-box multi-room setup, share four of the boxes/cards out on here... then split the monthly cost 5 ways between us, without phone-line validations they'd be none the wiser, as the dish is incomming only. ( As you can program the sly box to dial a prefix to get an outside line... you could actually get round this with some clever line-forwarding trickery, but it wouldnt really be worth the hastle ).

EDIT : Here's a wiki article about the initial tech-plan

[oneman]

On multi-room they do activily check for phone lines to stop people sending the 2nd boxes abroad and stuff, its in your contract. You will get charged a full second subscription if its not plugged in.

As for not having a phone line, the installer should have checked this during install and refused to connect the box if one was not available.