As I see this come up repeatedly, here's the lowdown on the use of Sky in Switzerland.

First off, Sky is contractually not allowed to broadcast everything across the border, so they have to take measures to contain reception and cannot be seen to break the agreement - a simple legal matter for them. So, they have put a number of things in place to stop use outside the UK:

• You'd need a UK address
• Interactive callback only works in the UK.

So, in principle, SKY itself cannot sell you services if you're not in the UK. You can get a service without phone callback (for instance, for a camper or mobile home) but you'd end up paying quite a bit more as Sky cannot your sell your viewing data to 3rd parties (the box watches what you watch!).

But business is business, and you will find people like www.skytvcard.com offering services nevertheless. So, how do they do it?

• They use a UK residential address for registration. SKY has no way of knowing if an address is a large apartment block or a single flat, so multiple subscriptions are OK.
• They use UK payment methods (CC on UK address etc).
• They isolate support from Sky - you should call them for problems, not Sky. Note that Sky has a contractual duty to disable the card if they suspect use from abroad.

So, in principle, Sky is still making the money (and your intermediate) but has no knowledge of where your card is. Also, the difference in volume (abroad use is only a small percentage of their overall subscriber base) makes it not worth it for Sky to investigate.

In principle, you could do the above yourself if you had UK friends. But what about the telephone line requirement? Three answers:

1. as above, you could claim you're installing in a "mobile home" (i.e. don't have a fixed landline) and will thus pay a lot more;
2. a provider as above can sell you a gadget that routes the box call to the UK using call forwarding techniques;
3. you buy yourself a Vonage subscription (vonage.co.uk) with a UK address. The Internet gadget comes with an ordinary BT jack socket, and will give you a landline number in the UK using the Internet (handy to have anyway if you have a lot of UK friends as landline calls are included in the monthly subscription, approx CHF 20). Plug your Sky box in and it will be able to dial back without anyone realising that its physical location is not in the UK.

Before I forget, discuss your needs with a good provider before you get a subscription. There are Sky digiboxes out there that are more capable than just Sky, AFAIK some can handle extra satellite inputs so you could also have it pick up and record programs from Hotbird or Hispasat or whatever extra satellite takes your fancy. There is, for instance, an unscrambled Thai TV5 channel you can get on Hotbird-4, I managed to get that to work on a Sky box with a T-switch between 2 dishes.

That's all folks..