Tuesday 4 December 2012

Skyfail - Lost in the move 1 phone number with no explanation


Moving house is a good time to have a life laundry, dump some of the junk, refresh the wall pictures and generally move on in life. When moving locally (less than a mile) one thing you don't expect to loose is the phone number you've had for 12 years.

Kevin and his house moving crew packed up our world into boxes, into his van and down the road. We had triaged the clutter into move, charity shop and dump boxes to get started on the stuff reduction but there was still a big pile of things to move. Remember when reducing clutter with a partner that "My Junk is Stuff but your Stuff is Junk."

All Sky UK TV had to do was move a landline phone number from one external line to another within the same exchange code. To be fair Sky made the moving process easy, click on a few buttons and fill a few forms, wait a few days, then the broadband, phone, satellite services were moved. They even had a land line and dish install guy come round to check the service. Unfortunately the phone service was assigned with a new number.

The other half is way more organised than I am and had sticky labels and stationary prepared and was already half way down the long list of organisations to contact with the new address. I did not help by saying I liked the new number that does have a glow to it being a bracketed palindrome.

A call to Sky customer service provided no explanation other than "The customer service rep should have told you when you placed the order." I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a business process failure somewhere between Sky and BT Openreach who control the exchange lines.

Anyway that really does not cut it, no technical or service explanation for what will be a lot of unnecessary hassle and inconvenience. The impact of this on Sky ? Everyone of our 250 closest friends and family gets to hear the story.

 Lets put this down to a Skyfail.  Cue the music Adel .... the thin lady sings.

Cheers Gannett






2 comments:

Gannett said...

Turns out after a bit of research a probably cause explanation is found on this page :
http://www.ukphoneinfo.com/s1_code_allocations.php?GNG=1237
The old house number 01237 42xxxx was issued in 2000 from BT. When Broadband+Homecall bundles became available we moved to Pipex and then on to Sky for a better all round package keeping the same number.
The web page above shows that phone numbers starting
01237 70xxxx
belong to "BSKYB LLU Assets Limited" ( LLU= local loop unbundling ). So when we moved house Sky probably issued a "stop and reissue" rather than a move number. As they can only / wanted to issue a 01237 70xxxx numbers that's what we ended up with.
Typical telco/ocd mentality, the ability to move numbers between vendors locally is sacrificed for organising numbers into neat rows of boxes.

john smith said...

. I've added a link explaining how to modify DNS settings on Mac. sky uk phone number