Sky broadband

Sudden

Sudden

Sudden

Soldato
Joined
15 Nov 2005
Posts
2,955
Location
London
How is sky, on their max package?

Currently with zen, who are of course excellent. But expensive. I know you get what you pay for, and will stick with them if you guys say that sky aren't good, but just wanted opinions.

Their max pack says unlimited I think for 15 a month. Is it? Or subject to fair usage? It says no, but yea :p I have sky tv anyway, so is it worth switching to them?

Currently on the zen 2mb unlimited pack for 35. Can get 8mb for the same price, but limit at 50gb. Now in my 4 years, i've gone over the 50 maybe twice or thrice, and never by more than another 5 gb, but I like the idea of knowing there isn't a limit.

What's peoples experiences been with sky in terms of true download limits and speeds, customer service, uptime etc?
 
yep, I'm on the 16mb package and I regularly get 11mb which is pretty good considering tiscali said I categorically couldn't get more than 2mb after they signed me up for their 8mb service.

Never have any noticeable slowdown any time of the day.. very happy.

The only minor gripe is that they give netgear routers that can be flakey and they won't give you your username and password but you can hack the router to get it easily enough and I'm currently using a Dlink and its aaaaaaall good :)

No plans to go anywhere else.
 
The latency wont be as good as Zen due to Sky using Interleaving on their LLU lines, if you speak to tech support they can lower the Max Delays to 8 which should give you pings of about 35ms to google/multiplay/jolt etc.

Apart from the this really, its reliable, unlimited and quick :)
 
Good to see the service is actually unlimited :)

The routers, do you have to use one? I have an internal ADSL card, which is what i'm using with zen. Can I continue with that or need the router? And how bad is the netgear one? Just the occassional thing, or a bit more frequent? Worth investing a new router?

And how is the customer service? I've never had to use Zen's but looking at their forum, you have Zen people replying pretty quickly to most stuff, which seems great :)

How much worse is the latency rabtech? noticeable in playing games or hardly at all? I do play FPS's etc

Also - Zen gives a free web address alongside which I find great for quickly uploading things and getting them from somewhere else. Does sky have anything of the like?


THanks for the help all :)
 
Its in Skys Terms and Cons that you must use there router so officially yes you have to use it. Unorficially there are ways of getting the details you require so that you don't need to use it. You would have course need to reconnect the router if you needed to contact sky for any reason.

Personally I would advise using the router and ditching the ADSL PCI card anyway.
 
The latency (once reduced) shouldn't really be much different to your Zen connection whilst ingame to UK/European servers. IE you wouldn't notice it.

I'd agree with gamesaregood too with ditching the ADSL PCI card as this will use CPU time and may not be 100% ADSL2+ compatible. Although the choice is yours at the end of the day.

You will need to extract the username/password from the router anyway to use the ADSL PCI Modem, if it is compatible.
 
Hi l'v just joined Sky Max being with Sky already, Sky TV + Sky talk I only pay £10 a month for broadband, their latest offer is if you take Sky TV +Sky talk you only pay £10 a month for broadband. I was with BT for phone + broadband at the time by taking just Sky TV + Sky talk we saved money, as I had just renewed my BT broadband contract at the time. Now my contract is up on the 21st April and I join sky on the 21st April by doing this we saved £20 just alone on broadband, can I just say no matter what isp you join some folk's will be disappointed.
 
The ping is always good for me, even for my laptop on wireless I can get under 70ms, on the desktop I never really get above 100ms, more like 50.

The router isn't that bad at all, reasonably good coverage, could be a little better and is only 802.11g and 100Mbps but oh well.
 
Rabtech said:
The latency wont be as good as Zen due to Sky using Interleaving on their LLU lines, if you speak to tech support they can lower the Max Delays to 8 which should give you pings of about 35ms to google/multiplay/jolt etc.

Apart from the this really, its reliable, unlimited and quick :)
Click to expand...

With interleaving on i get a ping of 29 to a server i was on a minute ago. I dont feel the need to have delays reduced.
 
Been with sky for about 3 years and it's been perfect. Always get full speeds and never any downtime.
Gaming is also fine, pings are a little higher because the line is interleaved but it hasn't made much difference to me.

If you go for Sky Max it will cost £15. If you have Sky Max & Sky Talk it cost's £10.
 
If you don't mind paying a little extra for the 'full service' you could always go with UK Online. They're owned by Sky and are basically on the same network (as with O2 and Be*), except UKO has its own dedicated fibre rings on the backhaul. Sky Max (16Mbps) is £10 a month, you're supposed to use their Netgear, and need to hack it if you want to get your user/pass for another router. They only allow interleave, but will tweak the depth and delay once you manage to get hold of tier 3.

UKO have the same bandwidth available, offer 16Mbps officially but will generally uncap you to 22 or 24Mbps if you ask tier 3 nicely and your line's good enough to receive those speeds. They have freephone customer services and tech support, always answered in a ring or two 24/7/365 (try that with Sky!). They offer fastpath which = better pings. No restrictions on which router you can use, they just give you your user/pass and you're away. I think they make you buy a DG834GT when you sign up but you can always auction it once you receive it. Solid uptime, knowledgeable UK based tech support (no Indians/Bulgarians/etc) and reliable service.

I get 22Mbps down from them (that's my actual connection speed, though I can get 23.5Mbps using a Billion router with coding gain 7 set) and get 2.3 MB/sec constantly. No slow-downs, no peak times, no throttling or 'management', no blocked ports. £25.99 a month well spent imho. \:D/
 
I was with UKonline and i managed to break the contract with them as I was getting horrendous service, pings of 120 + packetloss of epic proportions. Moved back to my old ISP and 30 - 35ms pings and 0 PL again. Spent hours on the phone to them trying to resolve this issue but nothing ever came of it in the end.
 
I always get at least 14mb without fail, I download what I want when I want and my pings are always low.

Its cheap, but in this case the product you are buying is well beyond the £10ppm you pay.

Its just a no frills service, I love it personally and cant recommend it enough.

The only gripe is the netgear routers, but once you get past that it fine.
 
UK online thing sounds appealing, but is only about 10 quid less than Zen. Not enough to justify a change. Especially since I looked at their site, and a fair usage policy does apply, which from what I can see, and people here are saying, is not the case with sky. + the 50 for the router is unnecessary if sky is giving one for free.

So from what it seems like, switching to Sky is a good move.

Couple more questions though :)

Do they give any sort of free web space? zen gives 1 gb which I find very useful.


Also, generally, have people found their customer service good? I know a couple of people said yes, and one said no, but if anyone else had any experience?

Also, do they have a minimum contract? like 12 months or so? Or just a month by month basis?

Thanks everyone for the help :) Appreciate it.
 
Sudden, as I said UKO do make the Netgear a mandatory purchase BUT you get 24Mbps if you ask (compared to 16 on Sky), their tech support is free, immediate and skilled (compared to Sky's mega long waits and hit-and-miss approach) and despite what the (out of date) site says you don't have to worry about any FUP.

I pull between 500GB and 1TB a month on UKO and they never ask questions. They're on the exact same network as Sky except they also have dedicated gigabit rings for their own customers. Trust me, throttling, port blocking or traffic shaping and bandwidth limits aren't something you need to worry about on UKO LLU. It might "only" be a tenner a month cheaper than Zen, but that's a big percentage of the overall monthly sub and a good yearly saving.

Sky and UKO both have 12 month contracts. As Sky's router is locked down, any attempt to flash it to normal firmware or extract your user/pass to run a third party router is forbidden by their T&Cs (though people still do it). UKO have no such restrictions, and you can just sell the Netgear you buy from them and use any router you wish.

I hope this is of some use to you, whatever you decide.
 
UKonline are good in their LLU area's but anyone on DSL6 ( bt lines ) had a lot of issues while I was with them.
 
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