Sky broadband has been rubbish these last few weeks

DataVampire · 4 Jun 2020 at 23:44

Avalon said:
Sky have been offering gfast for ages, the new trial is a new FTTP trial (announced earlier this week). Gfast won’t see a wider rollout, it was officially scrapped last year and only pre-approved build or rare situations where it’s not viable to do FTTP will get gfast.

That is not strictly true.
We had our sky g fast installed today. by bt open reach. Had a long chat with the guy actually lol. Hes been installing broadband fiber since 1997. Fttp is a long way off according to the installer who did mine. he said g-fast will be around for a long time. He also said bt open reach had lost the contract to install fttp and a company called gigabit fiber something like that has it. but they are about to loose it. because they should have been installing fttp in rural areas, they have been install ing it in towns. breaking there contract.

He also said bt plans on closing(or would like to) all exchanges. by 2025. and have everyone using voip phones. the fly in the ointment is premises that cannot get some sort of fiber. and thus leave some people without a phone line so they are trying to sort that.
He also said the gfast 1 option will become the standard fibre install with g-fast 2 being the faster option. until fttp is widely available, and according to him that will take quite a long time.

Avalon · 5 Jun 2020 at 00:37

DataVampire said:
That is not strictly true.
We had our sky g fast installed today. by bt open reach. Had a long chat with the guy actually lol. Hes been installing broadband fiber since 1997. Fttp is a long way off according to the installer who did mine. he said g-fast will be around for a long time. He also said bt open reach had lost the contract to install fttp and a company called gigabit fiber something like that has it. but they are about to loose it. because they should have been installing fttp in rural areas, they have been install ing it in towns. breaking there contract.

He also said bt plans on closing(or would like to) all exchanges. by 2025. and have everyone using voip phones. the fly in the ointment is premises that cannot get some sort of fiber. and thus leave some people without a phone line so they are trying to sort that.
He also said the gfast 1 option will become the standard fibre install with g-fast 2 being the faster option. until fttp is widely available, and according to him that will take quite a long time.

Prime example of why a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing in the wrong hands, either your installer is severely misinformed (not as unlikely as you’d hope) or you got the wrong end of what he was saying, much as you did with my post.

OpenReach issued guidance to ISP’s that is wanted to have 10m premises serviceable with g.fast, then revised it to 5.7m in 2018 as it switched focus to FTTP, then by September 2018 it was revised down to 2.73m total by March 2020 and all build that was scheduled beyond March 2020 was under review. FTTP was expected to hit 4m by end of Q1 2021. As to pulling PSTN the consultation started (and finished) in 2018, the whole migration will be completed by 2025 as things stand (excluding LLU), that’s why SOGEA is now a thing and ISP’s are introducing VOIP ports. The contract thing sounds like you/they have confused two different issues. Either way, what I said is accurate, what you reiterated from your installer isn’t.

Going back to the original purpose of this thread, it appears that Sky did identify an issue causing sync rates to significantly drop (around half) a few days back, but would clear/re-occur over 24hrs and was affecting some customers nationally, though they haven’t officially announced it yet, a fix was sorted out earlier this week.

Phil2008 · 5 Jun 2020 at 03:07

DataVampire said:
He also said bt open reach had lost the contract to install fttp and a company called gigabit fiber something like that has it. but they are about to loose it. because they should have been installing fttp in rural areas, they have been install ing it in towns. breaking there contract.

I guess thats why bt has just installed it in my area because I live in the countryside

My connection is going off and on like a yoyo atm,, it started happening at 2am. Its reconnected now at 3am and the connection speed has now dropped to 3mb, Whats going on :eek:

The "SNR Margin" is going all over the place, ive just seen it as low a 0.5 and as it gets higher the "attainable rate" gets higher (thought it was suppose to decrease). The "SNR Margin" has settled down now at 23 with a "attainable rate" of 8.9mb

15 mins ago

Now

iMacMart · 5 Jun 2020 at 04:57

bremen1874 said:
Worth checking what you can, but it may be as simple as more of your neighbours taking up VDSL connections and reducing your speeds due to increased crosstalk.

Put a filter in the test socket and the download sync is still 63mb, shame ....

Caged · 5 Jun 2020 at 10:20

Phil you've done everything you can do to rule out your own equipment, if you're still having connection issues then it needs to go to Openreach to fix. There's no amount of modem tweaking or line test running that can fix a physical cable fault.

iMacMart said:
Thats a fair shout, wish Sky would hurry up with the G Fast rollout they put me through to that dept when I called about my sync drop, got all excited thinking they would say "yes your in an area we can provide this service to"

If you aren't hitting full FTTC sync then it's unlikely that Gfast would be offered to you, let alone provide an improvement.

iMacMart · 5 Jun 2020 at 15:06

Caged said:
If you aren't hitting full FTTC sync then it's unlikely that Gfast would be offered to you, let alone provide an improvement.

Thats the issue, I was hitting full sync 75mb up until 5 weeks back and it dropped to 63mb ...

iMacMart · 13 Jun 2020 at 07:31

Well what do you know, plugged a filter into the test socket and was the same speed (last week) I checked this morning and it’s bumped back up to full sync?

Connection Speed (Kbps) 79994 20000

Caged · 13 Jun 2020 at 11:06

What does the maximum rate show as? One of our lines is about 260m long and comfortably gets 80/20 but is still only estimated 110/15 with G.fast, which just isn't worth it. If you aren't clearing 80/20 with the attainable rates then G.fast will be a fight to have installed, and will probably cause you issues.

Phil2008 · 13 Jun 2020 at 19:43

It will probably fail now... I haven't rung sky up, but look here......

Avalon · 13 Jun 2020 at 19:46

Caged said:
What does the maximum rate show as? One of our lines is about 260m long and comfortably gets 80/20 but is still only estimated 110/15 with G.fast, which just isn't worth it. If you aren't clearing 80/20 with the attainable rates then G.fast will be a fight to have installed, and will probably cause you issues.

It’s all relative, the losses early on can have a significant impact, in cases like that, you can do very little. I am just under 300m, I have an actual 239/35 logged in the checker tool with a clean line (full re-pull from cab via new pole rather than mess about with existing ducting - I got my money’s worth), that ignores the horrors of the last 10m buried direct in concrete for 5 decades), so moving the master socket to the exterior wall and bypassing the existing wiring should improve things slightly.

Phil2008 · 23 Jun 2020 at 12:59

Well the net has been great, its been connected for well over a week,, then bang, yesterday and today I haven't been able to keep a stable connection unless I increase the snr to 20+ db.. Im sure its because bt are constantly messing about with the lines in our area, I wish they would leave the things alone.

Caged · 23 Jun 2020 at 13:44

Have you reported a fault to Sky yet?

Phil2008 · 23 Jun 2020 at 20:46

no, as I thought it was fixed