Sky Broadband - Recent speed changes

SMN · 13 Nov 2010 at 17:05

Hey all,

Anyone else on Sky broadband experience a massive drop in broadband speed? I had mine synced at 8Mb for the past 5 months, then suddenly its dropped to 6Mb now 4Mb.

Attention is still fine as before, got 32db line attenuation downstream, and 19db attenuation upstream. As for noise margin, I have 15db noise margin down and 16db upstream noise margin.

I understand that the cold snap has affected the copper increasing loss, but I cant understand a 50 % drop in 2 weeks. Further to this, i keep seeing the occasional Loss of Synchronisation:

Tue, 2010-11-09 21:55:33 - Loss of synchronization :11
Tue, 2010-11-09 22:42:04 - Loss of synchronization :12
Tue, 2010-11-09 22:55:34 - Loss of synchronization :13
Tue, 2010-11-09 22:58:04 - Loss of synchronization :14

This happens every other day at random times. Anyone else experiencing this?

SMN

ethos · 13 Nov 2010 at 17:12

Lots of re-syncs will raise your SNR resulting in a lower sync, which looks like what's happened here. Sky's default target SNR all being well is 7dB.

I would contact sky, and/or pop over to the skyuser forums and make a post.

Has anything changed? Are you plugged into the master socket? Have you tried plugging into the test socket? Etc...

SMN · 13 Nov 2010 at 18:32

Nah nothings changed, it's literally been the last 2 weeks it's dropped speed. I'm going to power it off over night and see if it makes a difference etc.

cb_linus · 14 Nov 2010 at 16:53

On Sky here and broadband speed varying a fair bit recently, in the past few days I've had speeds ranging from less than 56k (dialup speeds) to a maximum recorded of about 3.5Mbps. An hour ago it was just over 2Mbps, now it's about 0.8Mbps

Mattus · 14 Nov 2010 at 17:02

SMN said:
Nah nothings changed, it's literally been the last 2 weeks it's dropped speed. I'm going to power it off over night and see if it makes a difference etc.

It won't. What's happened is that the repeated loss of synchronisation has caused Sky's systems to treat your line as unstable and raise the target SNR. This is why your speed is down.

No amount of resetting will fix it. The SNR will only go down after a period of complete stability, or if you contact Sky to reset it.

First, though, you need to find out what was making your line unstable - or the problem may just happen again. Are you in the master socket? Are you connected directly or via an extension lead? Is there any noise on the line?

cb_linus · 14 Nov 2010 at 21:14

SMN said:
Nah nothings changed, it's literally been the last 2 weeks it's dropped speed. I'm going to power it off over night and see if it makes a difference etc.

Have a read up over on the skyuser forums on dynamic line management, I suspect this is what's happening to my connection as we recently had a change in our sky package. If this is the case then I would recommend not to turn off your router

Locky · 14 Nov 2010 at 21:31

I can't see how cold would affect copper lines ?

Mercenary Keyboard Warrior · 15 Nov 2010 at 16:21

Cold if anything should make them perform better.

Unless its actually moisture thats the issue, a friend lived a fair distance from his nearest box and wet weather reduced his connection speed noticably. A day of dry and it would go back up again, took ages to diagnose the common fault behind his dramatic speed drops, but once he did it was like clockwork, wet weather = bad connection, weather dried up, connection back to normal.