[csmithuk]

Sky user here[1].

Turn it off then!

This is entirely optional. It asks you when you first install and connect the router via the WiFi landing page if you want to use any blocking. If you don't answer the question or select no, there is no blocking at all apart form the IWF firewall stuff. Every kind of blocking comes with problems of some description. You either live with it or trust your users.

[1] £7.50/month for ADSL2 for 12 months with line rental and calls included was too good a deal to throw away. I'd go for Andrews & Arnold if I could afford idealism at the moment.

[laumars]

You're missing the point here. Some parents are not tech-savy and thus depend on the controls given to them by their ISP (etc) to help manage the level of access their kids have to the internet. Suggesting they simply turn off the parental controls doesn't actually fix the problem, it just shifts the problem (ie the problem is shifted from sites not functioning properly to kids having access to everything).

While I do agree that parental controls are not foolproof; occasionally legitimate sites get caught up in the blacklist and kids will usually find a way around many blocks, suggesting parents completely disable such censors is a little like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

[csmithuk]

Perhaps the parents should spend some time with their children and show them what is appropriate and what is not?

I have three children, all of whom use the Internet regularly and bar some passive monitoring, I've done nothing. They have healthy browsing habits.

Blacklists, censorship, firewalls and control are missing the point...

Plus you're going to get goatse'd at some point in your life...

[laumars]

> Perhaps the parents should spend some time with their children and show them what is appropriate and what is not?

Kids will already know this, the question is whether they still wish to push their luck if they think they can get away with it. If they're anything like me, then they will :)

So I wouldn't trust my kids with an unfiltered internet any more than I'd give them satellite / cable TV in their rooms before a sensible age as I cannot simply assume that they wouldn't watch adult movies / etc, after I've gone to bed.

Sometimes it's better to remove the temptation than to give your kids access to the entirety of the adulthood and hope they're sensible / innocent enough not to abuse that trust. Much like I wouldn't keep junk food in the house if I'm trying to lose weight.

> I have three children, all of whom use the Internet regularly and bar some passive monitoring, I've done nothing. They have healthy browsing habits.

How can you be so sure what your kids do when you're not looking?

> Plus you're going to get goatse'd at some point in your life...

In that case lets also show them "2 Girls 1 Cup" on their 8th birthday; because it's bound to happen one day :p

> Blacklists, censorship, firewalls and control are missing the point...

Actually I do partly agree with this (and the passive monitoring comment I mentioned earlier). As argumentative as I might come across, I do agree that the best form of moderation is to keep the internet restricted to a family PC in a communal area. Not everyone does this though.

[MichaelGG]

>So I wouldn't trust my kids with an unfiltered internet

Why? Like what exactly are you concerned about? Just that they might "watch adult movies"?

[laumars]

Some content might be too violent or scary. Or too sexual. I'm not someone who wraps their kids in cotton wool, but I'd like to protect their innocence until they're ready to watch adult content rather than rush them into adulthood just because the content is out there to be viewed.

[rmc]

(a) Non-techie mundane people have heard about the vast wave of horrible kiddie porn and grooming stalkers just waiting to kill your child. Why would they turn off the only thing protecting their loved ones from harm?[1]

(b) What should you do? Phone up the tech support line and tell them you (essentially) want to look at fisting porn? What if they recognise your voice? What if someone finds out that you want to look at all that dodge extreme porn sites?[1]

[1] I'm not saying this is accurate, just how some people think.

[csmithuk]

a) I know a lot of parents. Not one actually cares about this. They care more than some nasty piece of work will nick their child's phone on the way home, which is far more realistic and common. I reckon the 1% are noisier than the 99% here.

b) No - see my post. When you connect the router and hit it with the first WiFi connection, it is configured by default to allow everything. At which point you can then tell them you don't want oodles of fisting porn shoved at you or just ignore the question and carry on getting your fix.

The only thing these statements prove is that the noiser people are consistently more likely to be wallies.

[johneth]

> I'd go for Andrews & Arnold if I could afford idealism at the moment.

I've heard Xilo are quite good regarding filtering, quality, etc., and they're cheaper than A&A.

[csmithuk]

I can't see any ADSL offerings on their site. Do you have a link?

[johneth]

Sure: http://www.xilo.net/adsl_broadband/

Disclaimer: I've never used them, I've just read some positive reviews on reddit and places a couple of monnths ago.

[voltagex_]

Interested Australian user here. That's about half of the cost of our cheaper monthly ADSL2 plans - what's the catch? How far away from the exchange are you?

[csmithuk]

Well I was an O2 customer. Sky bought O2 last year and in the effort to maintain their customer-base they will give you silly offers if you argue with them for long enough. It's usually £20.50/month including line rental but I argued it down to £7.50/month on the basis I stayed with them for 12 months.

No catch. Confirmed no traffic management, no download limit, free router, free migration. This is purely for customer retention.

I'm 800m away from the exchange and get 12.2Mbits down and 1.1Mbits up.

I pull an average of 120Gb/month over the line with no problems.

Edit: just to add I was paying £35.50/month with O2 before which is crazy amounts.

[Cor]

I wish I was having as good a time as you are.

I was on o2 for 3-4 years before being transferred over to Sky last month. Since transferring, I've had nothing but problems. Online gaming pings have gone from 20 -> 50, download speeds have fallen 20-30%, my connection frequently hangs (Youtube is near unusable), and I now have issues loading websites from time to time (I had to refresh Google 3 times before it loaded earlier). To make things worse, Sky is charging me £15.50 a month while o2 was only charging £7.50.

Thankfully, BT is installing fibre in my area so I should be able to jump over to plus.net sometime soon. I can't wait.

[csmithuk]

If it's unusable, tell them and say you will stop paying for it as it doesn't live up to their advertising. Your rights are protected outside the contract. Threaten to complain to Ofcom if they resist. They'll let you leave and give you the MAC code.

I'm in London and my exchange has Sky LLU support. Coincidentally I live in the same postcode as Sky HQ so any problems, I'll talk face to face with them as I have some contacts.

[Cor]

I did ring technical support to get the issues fixed last Thursday -- apparently a higher level technician will call me back within '10 working days'. Hmm.

I'm not trapped by a 12 month contract, which is why I'm not too annoyed about the situation. My cabinet will get fibre fitted early next month, so I should only have to endure Sky for another month or two thankfully, which is ok by me.

[csmithuk]

Cool good news then :)

[davb]

Sky don't have the best reputation when it comes to issue resolution. I was a former Sky broadband customer and found their customer care and technical teams to be woefully lacking. Additionally, they have no real SLA to speak of, and all of their service plans (as far as I understand) have a standard 1:50 contention ratio. Ouch. And when I was a customer (a couple of years ago), they refused to divulge the the ADSL (PPPoA) RADIUS credentials, making it much more difficult to use your own ADSL router.

For many users (especially your average home/family users with less technical requirements, not using it for critical purposes such as home working) they're probably perfectly adequate.

FWIW, I use BT's (formerly British Telecom) FTTC Infinity for Business product. 78Mbps down, 20Mbps up, worst case 1:20 contention, no caps or allowance-related FUP. Their customer care and technical teams are pretty decent. And I can get a /29 in addition to the dynamic PPP IP for the WAN link. Where I am (NE Scotland), BT own all of the widely available (non-private) infrastructure so it's easier to deal with a single company in the event of a failure vs being pushed between ISP and infrastructure provider. YMMV.

EDIT: FYI I pay £45 ex VAT (~AUD 102).

[csmithuk]

I'm actually using my line for home working 100% of the time. However I have a backup (3G card in my laptop and friendly neighbours with different ISPs including different mode Cable and WiFi). I think that is a better investment than an expensive line to start with simply because regardless of who you are with, the end of the line is with OpenReach who are abysmal. The difference between £100/month and £7.50/month is moot then.

I treat my home connection like a coffee shop's WiFi.

The real meat and two veg of my setup is a hosted desktop I RDP into and a number of hosted Linux machines.