Sky box with Vonage phone line?

Posts: 5 · New Forum Member Joined: May 28, 2007 Posts: 5

Hi everyone,

At the minute I have a Vonage line with Virgin Media Broadband and TV, and it works really well and means I don't have to pay any extra line rental for a line from Virgin Media or BT. Very soon I'm moving house to an area where I'll be able to get Sky TV (which I want to do so I can watch Sky One), and my plan was to ditch the TV from Virgin Media, and stick with Vonage over VM Broadband for my phone.

I believe that with Sky if you want to subscribe to Multiroom or Sky+ (and I will) then the sky box has to "phone home" every once in a while, and I've heard from a friend that it can't do this over a Vonage line. My information however is a good few years out of date, and I would love to know if anyone has had success in subscribing to Sky over a Vonage line, or if the issue has been completely resolved now that Voip has become more mainstream.

If it's not possible for the Sky box to use the Vonage voice line to phone home, then another thing I thaught might work would be to take out a fax line from Vonage, which I'm assuming wouldn't be subject to the same compression as the voice line, and so might work better (thats just a guess, so if anyone could confirm that it would be really helpful). As much as I don't want to have to pay an extra £6 a month for a fax line just to keep sky happy, if its my only option I'd far rather do that than take out an extra line I don't need from Virgin Media or BT.

Many Thanks!

Posts: 120 · Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 5:55 am Post subject: Use existing Vonage line.

Use your existing Vonage line for your sky box, a fax line is just a stripped down version of the same thing, if you get issues with dialing out try prefixing *99 before the number that the box dials.
This will maximise bandwidth during that call.

Posts: 5 · New Forum Member Joined: May 28, 2007 Posts: 5

Thanks for the reply - sky boxes only let you add numerical prefixes, is there an equivalent code which is only made of numbers?

Joe

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Jun 15, 2007 Posts: 1

Joe... just tell them you don't have a phone. All it is for is for them to check your card is in the box it should be. You do not need a phone line to have sky TV installed. The only thing you won't be able to do is order movies/sports extras etc via your remote. You will need to 'phone' them to order lol. I sell sky and sell to people who don't have a phone. So it is possisble. Hope this helps Smile

Posts: 328 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Dec 13, 2005 Posts: 328

You can also just set your Vonage adapter to use the g.711 codec (high bandwidth/high quality) and you will likely be OK. This is the same as what you get call by call with *99 - you just make it the default. If the box is running one of the lower bandwidth codecs, it will probably not work for this application.