Help with technical explanation please.

I have been on skys non llu service (which I now understand may have been a mistake) for a couple of weeks and its usually [censored]. Sometimes get speeds of approx 6 meg but most of the time its les than 1 meg.

I have contacted sky a few times by email and just now by phone. The girl I spoke to was adamant that there could be nothing wrong with their service as the router stats show a downstream connection speed of 8128. From what I gather on here this is not the case. Is there somone who can explain this to me or give a link which explains it as I want to get back to them and refute the claim.

She said I should run spyware and antivirus checks (which I have done). I explained the slow connection is apparant on the laptop as well as the desktop so the chances that its a problem with the computers is slim.

Thank in advance.

Craig

There are two speeds that are relevant. The connection speed (referred to by Sky) is the speed at which the router has connected to the exchange equipment. There's also the speed which you get from speedtests, which, I suspect, is what you're referring to.

If, as Sky say, your router is connected at 8128 but your download speedtests are sometimes much less, it suggests that your exchange is very congested. The router is willing and able to download at around 8000 but congestion at the exchange is preventing it from doing so. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do unless you can get onto an LLU service at your exchange.

John.

It won't necessarily be exchange congestion. The service is highly throttled. Sky LLU is great, but Sky Connect is a rebadged BT product, and it's rubbish.

Any "all you can eat" IPStream service that's priced at under the £50 per month mark will be heavily oversubscribed and present the problems that you are experiencing. If no LLU services are present, all that you can do is migrate out to a provider that charges a realistic price or manages/throttles traffic or limits download allowances.