Oh dear....
Lets try and get this back on a positive note, I'll start...
I currently have: Sky Digital (Satellite Dish), Sky landline and Sky broadband. I have a mobile service from Three.
In summary, here's what I think and what I am likely to do in the coming months:
Sky TV - Good customer service, including Irish call centres. Top quality picture and sound, very good selection of tv stations overall (albeit, they come at a cost). Past experience has shown them willing to negotiate on price (although generally only discount for 3-6 month periods, then you have to call them and go through a 20 minute conversation all over again). I may keep my tv service with Sky, but I am seriously considering a combination of Saorview/Freeview and Netflix due to Sky's costs... which seem to go up without fail every year.
Sky Broadband - reliable, but slow. Best I've had from them to date is about 20megs download and about 5mbts upload, averaging 12-14mbts download speed (and I'm literally a few miles form Dublin city centre). They rely on Eir's network so that is part of the problem, but very frustrating when you are being charged the same as someone getting close to the advertised 100mbs from the same service provider, only a mile or so away. I expect I will move my broadband requirements to Virgin and benefit from their fiber lines.
Sky Telephone (landline) - Service is fine, basic package is competitive but one big drawback ... mobile calls are not included and can't be included as an add on to their packages. The call charges appear to be expensive when used out of the bundle (I have evenings and weekends), with mobile calls also being expensive at any time. I'm going to look elsewhere with a view to moving to an alternative which includes mobile calls in a competitively priced bundle.
Three Mobile - absolute nightmare. Signal has been unreliable for as long as I can recall. Funny thing, often a call does not come through and goes straight to voicemail... guess what, Three charge you to dial into your voicemail ! Customer service is not only difficult to deal with (given they are located in far away places and most staff have accents that I find very difficult to understand), but also very frustrating as they rarely solve a problem when I call they often do little more than give me the runaround. I know a couple of other people having the same type of experiences, while the internet is literally riddled with posts on various websites complaining about them. It came as no surprise that they were named as one of the phone companies receiving the most complaints (see:
here). Why ComReg have not taken action against them, I just don't know. They are good at marketing and promotion, but useless when it comes to proving a reliable mobile phone network in my view. I'm intending to run a mile from Three and never ever look back. While not cheap, I think Vodafone are most likely going to get my household's business.
My mother has Eir's telephone and also Eir's tv service. She's happy with the landline service, but tv service is not great - the "box" and menu are not great and in fairness, they definitely don't compete with Sky's HD box for example.
Hope that helps
