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UK Online to close January 14th 2011 - Official
Thursday 11 November 2010 14:46:32 by Andrew Ferguson

Many people were expecting that UK Online was going to close, the bits no one knew for sure were the date and what offers would be available for those users wanting to take the route of moving to Sky Broadband. Now we know that as of January 14th 2011, UK Online will be no more, with broadband, dial-up, e-mail and support services ceasing to operate.

Customers of UK Online should be being contacted by UK Online to inform them, and offer a 6 month introductory deal of six months free for Sky Broadband. Alternatively those who want to move to another provider can obtain their Migration Authorisation Code (MAC) from UK Online on the usual number (0800 053 2222) or 08442 410 532.

"Since 2005 Sky has operated two residential broadband services, Sky Broadband and UK Online. To better serve customers now and into the future we are going to focus all our efforts on Sky Broadband, which allows us to offer higher quality, better value services.

To ensure that UK Online customers enjoy uninterrupted broadband access, we are contacting them in plenty of time to provide clear advice on their options for finding a new broadband provider. This includes a very attractive offer to join Sky Broadband, which offers great value, truly unlimited downloads and the UK’s most consistent speeds."

Sky spokesperson

Moving provider can be fairly straightforward, what is a little disappointing is that the email server will be shutting down on the same day January 14th, and all stored emails deleted. Therefore if you are a UK Online customer you need to ensure that all your regular contacts know of your new email address by this date. For many people this may prove an appropriate time to set-up an email address that is independent of your broadband provider, by using one of the many domain email providers.

A status page is available on UK Online answering the common questions about the closure. Our UK Online forum section will remain open for as long we see a need for people to be using it, and may prove to be a good place for those seeking answers to questions on email, migrations and the various options available to them.

[ Topic: Internet Service Providers | 19 comments | link to this item ]

Comments

Posted by rizla over 3 years ago
So long and thanks to all the UKO/Easynet staff (hi Dan!).

The most reliable ISP I have ever had - 3 outages totalling 23 hours in 3 years.

Going to be hard to better that....

Posted by tommy45 over 3 years ago
It's going to be sad to see them go,sky can go suck, IMO they did not need to close uko

Posted by e102gamma over 3 years ago
The best ISP I've ever had. Sad. :(

Posted by solitaire over 3 years ago
I observed a 2 min silence on the passing of UKOnline
(Because those #*@%!! on sky put me on hold and they dropped the call! I didn't notice for 2 mins....)

I'm going to call the 0800 number in the morning...(it might be closed at the moment)

Posted by irrelevant over 3 years ago
I already called them - UKO have no more details than is already on the website. The rather despondent girl I spoke to said that letters were going out to everybody, and that might have more information on the deal Sky were offering.

I liked UKOnline. I signed up with them because their usage allowance was actually sensible (500GB when I signed up) and they had freephone tech support - not that I needed it often, but when last time I called Sky they kept me on hold for almost 20 mins before I got to speak to someone, at 5p/min!! That's just taking the pee..

Posted by otester over 3 years ago
Had them when I found out 1Mb was available (moved from Freeserve), good service, left them as they didn't offer up to 8Mb at the time it became available IIRC.

I will never touch Sky again, horrible company (luckily I only took their TV not broadband).

Posted by PiKe over 3 years ago
How is this going to work? I thought you had to be a Sky TV customer to take them up on the broadband?

Posted by BIORAPTOR over 3 years ago
@PiKe 9
No the packages are sepearet,you get £5.00 knocked off if you take the Sky Broadband and Sky Talk.
I took out the Sky Broadband & Sky talk with the TV package.
Hand on heart I have had no problem`s,with a consent up&down load speed.
May be I am one of the lucky ones.
Although I am thinking about going optical with another ISP provider.
No reflect on Sky,simply as I am a gamer and benefit more with a faster up load speed.

Posted by audioslim over 3 years ago
Skys broadband is UK Online network anyway.

The problems come when you try and contact Sky.
Then its down to the script readers to employ some sense. Its hard work with them.
They got my mac wrong when sent out, took 5 weeks for them to correct that. Their systems just didnt cope.

Add that to the fact that they didnt notice when my phone line went back to BT and continued to charge me for 5 months, despite me ringing them up every month and telling them

BE/O2 are a far better bet than Sky

Slim

Posted by lsguk over 3 years ago
Tier1 are crap but the CST do their jobs fine....bit of a long que but hey....10 million customers

Posted by chrysalis over 3 years ago
by far the best adsl isp I have had, mainly due to the fact it was never ever congested, only 1 isp side outage in 3 years and it allows SRA, before ukonline without SRA I had to resync at least twice a week and usually more, on ukonline with SRA I had sync uptimes lasting for over 6 months.

Posted by chrysalis over 3 years ago
Still unsure properly as to why sky are doing this, ukonline has a fair few business customers who probably wont even think twice of saying no to skybb, even those who do move to skybb will be paying 'less' cash. If they wanted to cut costs they could have merged the support to sky and then left the rest alone.

Posted by tommy45 over 3 years ago
I doubt it will be only business customers who wont be taking a service with sky,but a good number of the residential customers also, But as far as the business customers are concerned sky would not want them as they ain't got a clue how to support them, i think sky is killing uko, so it can make more from easynet, and add more customers to it DLM mass market products

Posted by Guest_Again over 3 years ago
Too bad. So sad. Bye-bye. :p

Posted by Jimkirk363 over 3 years ago
2 of my mates are not taking the sky option either. One thankfully has BT Infinity being activated end of Dec in his area and has signed for that and the other one has signed for Titan ADSL. I do have to say tho my ex partner has Sky LLU and its usually a rock solid 12mb+.

Posted by drteeth over 3 years ago
BT Infinity - 18 month contract and 'support' in India, ROTFLMAO. Much better providers of FTTC around.

Posted by peakpc over 3 years ago
UK Online, whew, sad to see you guys go. I remember back in 1995, when I first tried the internet, I had a 1 month free trial with UKOnline. Then I was told by UKOnline, I could have more than 1 trial. Okay, I admit I freeloaded a bit, but UKOnline was always the best ISP & I also sent a few customers their way.
I remember using my 14,400kbps modem to dial up. In those days, IRC was popular, and UKOnline had a channel on one of the IRC networks. It wasn't undernet, but I can't remember which it was, perhaps efnet.
What happened to those guys? Wizzard? Ratty? Jayne Louise Jones? LMB?

Posted by DoctorDibbo over 3 years ago
This was a great service that has been ruined by sky. UK Online were on the whole pretty good, though sometimes (not often) emails took ages to come through.

I'm the same as peakpc (above), and been with UK Online since 1995 and have had a fantastic service. The help line (not that I used it much) was free and the people there were helpful and knowledgeable (can't ask for more..)

There is no way I will go with sky.

Posted by paulj2001 over 3 years ago
I don't think I've ever heard of UK Online, lol. I've ben with AOL since 1998 and I don't recall ever having any outageplus I get download speeds of 10+Mbps and uploads of 0.83Mbps for £14.99/month. No complaints my end!