Sky Broadband Support – Are they taking the mickey, or what?
June 22nd, 2010
Over the past few days my broadband connection from Sky Broadband ("up to 20 Mb/s" so they claim) has been getting steadily more of a bad joke. In the mornings it's workable (today I was generally getting around 2.5 Mb/s download). After lunch it becomes sluggish and tiresome to use (round about 0.75 Mb/s). But from about 5pm you may as well give up.
As I write my download connection is 0.06 Mb/s. Yes, that's right, a measly 60 kilobits per second. That means a long, long wait between clicking a link on a Web page and eventually having the result page in a readable state in front of you.
At this speed iTunes and Tweetdeck simply don't work.
This, I'm assuming, is due to Sky's wonderful Traffic Management policy: the more useful you find the internet, the more we're going to try and discourage you from using it.
So I logged into my Sky account and went to try and raise a Support call. Here's the form they present you with, saying: "tell us about your query":
What?!!! In that space? Now they're really just rubbing salt in my wounds.
OK, so, after writing out my complaint elsewhere and then copying it into this field and submitting it, lo and behold, as I suspected (but didn't want to assume, in case I had to get all the way back there again if I was wrong) there's a follow-up screen where you can pick from options and then you can send Sky Support an email. But honestly! Usability: ever heard of it Sky? Did you ever roadtest this on anyone? Did you ever think how it feels to spend 10 minutes on a grindingly slow connection waiting for pages to slowly load, just to get to this page.
So I'm off to have a cold beer now, watch some football and cool down a bit.
And maybe by tomorrow this page will have uploaded to Web host. And maybe Sky will get back to me. But at the moment I'm not optimistic.
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