Sky Connect Broadband - Are you being slowed down?

[Gazz380]

As far as I'm aware, every Connect customer they lose costs them £30 in termination fees from BT plus a negative profit (further loss) if the customer has been with them less than ~18 months as they won't have broken even on the set up and recurring costs.

depends on there monthly costs per user, plus any fees pre and post setup, id say 12 months theyd break even

[steve16751]

Gazz380
Hi The reason Sky offer such a low price is tie you into a twelve month contract
during the 12 months Sky Talk and now Sky TV tie in for another 12 months all to do with
making a profit but if you only have say one product Sky will always run at a loss

GAZZ380depends on there monthly costs per user, plus any fees pre and post setup, id say 12 months theyd break even

I think Saturday is being conservative about time I would say about 20months

Saturday
As far as I'm aware, every Connect customer they lose costs them £30 in termination fees from BT plus a negative profit (further loss) if the customer has been with them less than ~18 months as they won't have broken even on the set up and recurring costs.

[Saturday]

id say 12 months theyd break even

Would you? Based on what?

Connect is £5 or £17/month depending on the deal - i.e. £60 or £204 a year.

• BTWholesale charge £34.86 for connection, £7.63 per month and £33.75 for termination i.e. £160.17 for a one year contract).
• The rental for a 622Mbit/s BT Central costs around £1.5m a year plus a £175k connection charge.
• Router provisioning and delivery is about £45.
• Service costs (people, systems, infrastructure and support) are anyone's guess.

And you think that equates to a 12 month payback per customer?

[sistersmirnoff]

i haven't read all this thread as it is so long but i am having problems with connect too. i am generally at work during the day, only at home at the moment due to the snow. my speeds during the evening have been under 1mb, usually about 700kb which is driving me mental. i don't use the net to download much, i use work's broadband for that lol.

it is now 9.30am and the speed is 6.6mb

i haven't rang sky to complain this time, have in the past, but i get muppets on the phone who frustrate me by telling me there must be something wrong with my pc, laptop or master socket but i am getting towards the end of my tether now!

[Gazz380]

i haven't rang sky to complain this time, have in the past, but i get muppets on the phone who frustrate me by telling me there must be something wrong with my pc, laptop or master socket but i am getting towards the end of my tether now!

sky technical basically they admitted there is traffic shaping going on and its all managed by BT he also admitted that it was an agreement between sky and bt to do it, and that there is no plans to fix this issue (like iamnottheenemy) has been telling us, also apparently Tier 1 will be informed shortly and they will be instructed to inform users on the connect package!

meaning its pointless to call sky cause there gonna do jack all about it! MAC codes galore!

[coreservers]

If that is accurate Saturday, and no reason to believe otherwise. then surely someone has mucked up Sky's business model.
the fella in ts last night sounded despondant at the numbers of mac codes he's giving out.
Surely it would be cheaper long term to seek out the abusers and kick them off the service than lose potentially thousands of customers. I work as IT support and we can trance broadcast storms etc very easily. surely between BT and sKy they can buy a tool to sort it out?

Or do sky want to offload connect?

[Brian69]

I think it is clear that Sky's business plan is looking forward to increasing the numbers on their net as opposed to paying for their customers to be on another net.

[Saturday]

then surely someone has mucked up Sky's business model.

No, the same model applies to mobile phones. Overall, more customers stay than leave so over the whole base, profit is made. There's also the aim to do what's called "upselling" and "cross selling" i.e. if a customer has one service then it is easier to sell another, plus extending the customer lifetime. There's also no doubt, an intention to migrate Connect customers to LLU.

It's not Sky's business model that has gone wrong but their business practices: a price increase in a recession, blackmailing customers into taking additional products and failing to keep existing customers happy.

Sky is also, it seems to me, falling into the same trap that mobile companies fell into a few years ago: massive land grab with senior executives bonused on new connections and ARPU with scant regard to customer churn. If the Connect churn is bad (and no doubt causing collateral damage) then Sky's CFO is going to be raising merry hell any time soon.

[coreservers]

I agree that more stay than go. but people do remember being stung by mobile companies, so many more will go, than did during the mobile scandals a few years ago. I'd have much more respect for companies who were honest with customers, rather than this culture of lies and mis truths that seems to pervade within sky AND BT management. Whether the CFO does raise hell or not is scant reward for 3 months plus of TS nonsense, no doubt led by management, and effectively money down the drain.

[Brian69]

In many ways I think Sky see themselves as "recession proof" the arguement being that customers will cut back on other entertainment outside the home before they cut back on Sky. As to the churn rate on Connect, if they are worried,we can expect to see some changes to the service. but we dont know what the true figure is, there may be many happy Connect customers.
This will be the first recession that Sky have gone through in which there is an alternative to them for TV, namely Freeveiw (I know it is not the same level of service, but it is better than 5 analogue channels) So Sky may come unstuck, we shall see.