Coming over to the Dark Side

I currently get 2.5mb through normal ADSL, I placed an order with Sky and have a go live date of 25th Oct, I'm going for 40/10mb connection £20 a month.

How's it going for others on this speed? Any restrictions at peak times? Getting decent ping times? - Heavy Gamer.

I could've gone for their all singing all dancing 80/20mb (gestimated speed of 57.5Mb/20.0Mb), but three reasons why not:

A) Existing hardware both wired and wireless not capable of transferring at such speeds and would need to get my homeplugs increased from 85mbps to 200 or even 500mbps - more cost (just because it says it'll do that speed, you normally get no where near it taking into account overheads - bit like "up to 24mb" rarely anyone will see it unless living on top of the exchange), Or could of gone wireless N but thats still gotta punch through two walls and signal may not reach the 150mbps, plus I use the connection for gaming a lot, so pings times and stability important.
B) It was £30 a month
C) With broadband speeds increasing for some of us, many are still in slow spots as such most webpages will load quickly anyway, any downloads you make are restricted to how fast the servers can upload.

My two penneths worth anyway, will let you know how I get on. I was tempted by going for the "full whack" speed, but it's just my cars faster than yours lol. Realistically you not going to notice for day to day use, unless you have a real serious need to shift data in a large way (business), I have seen a lot of FTTC providers do have restrictions and caps.

I recently changed back to Sky for their fibre product (ex-ADSL24). The installation went smoothly enough but even though I stipulated 40/10, they still managed to connect me on 40/2. Apart from that faux pas the connection does seem to be a vast improvement on my (also) previous 2.5mb connection.

My sagemcom f@st2504n syncs at exactly 40000/2000 but doing speed tests seems to either prove or disprove my throughput. Using TBs/Speedtest.net/Myspeed gives me results ranging between 19-38Mb with the Myspeed tester giving me the 38Mb result. Thinkbroadband always gives me about 19-22Mb, whilst its "usage tool" (when dowloading large files) can give me a throughput of anything from 48-78Mb(!!).
I will probably give it a a couple of weeks to see if it settles. All the speedtests were carried out over the past couple of days, on peak and off peak.

When the BT man fitted the equipment (1st Oct 12) he said I was only the 2nd one in the whole village to get it, I will leave my neighbours to find out for themselves that fibre is available, no point cluttering up a nice new cabinet now is there.
My ping on ADSL24 was 16-18ms, my ping on Sky is now at 15ms so not a big change and I am an avid online gamer, I wouldnt notice any diifference if it was less than 10 anyway, Id still die a lot.

As for not going for the 80/20 package, to be honest, the only advantage that would have for me would be Steam/Origin downloads and even 40/10(2) seems sufficient enough for this.
So to cut a very long story short I am happy so far and will be even happier when they fix my upload speed.

Edited by HiPing (Thu 04-Oct-12 13:05:43)

There is a theory that the speed reported by the 2504n is a fake speed, and not the real speed. Particularly as this is hidden away in the Openreach modem, i.e. providers router does no speed negotiation.

That's great news, thanks. I too use steam (cod mw3, l4d, l4d2 etc) I have to always backup my steammaps folder before reinstall of a system due to the vast file sizes and rubbish connection.

Do you think it is worth me speaking to sky prior to the installation date to ensure they are putting me on the 40/10 rather than the 40/2, or will it make little difference? I was under the impression that any existing 40/2's would automatically at some point go over to the 10mb upload anyway.

Nice ping times and I look forward to my activation gate, I have been notifying friends and family that their is FTTC available now, I like to help where I can, but agree you don't want too many people increasing that contention at the exchange.

Roll on the 25th Oct!

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

There is a theory that the speed reported by the 2504n is a fake speed, and not the real speed. Particularly as this is hidden away in the Openreach modem, i.e. providers router does no speed negotiation.

It was identified the speed the 2504n displays is actually returned in a non-standard option field in the DHCP packet. We have to assume the Sky systems know the speed you are sync'd to (as other ISPs get the data from Openreach) so there is no reason why this can't be correct. Others have reported lower and higher numbers.

It only updates on a power cycle of the 2504n though.

Ta will commit that to my write once, read many times memory core.

I watched the BT Openreach engineer test the service using his test equipment in the vdsl socket on the wall. This was 40/2. This is the speed reported from the SKY router. Will report back when the conection changes from 40/2 to 40/10, once I am moved to the correct profile.

Actually I have just reset the BT & SKY router (power off / on) and the SKY router is now reporting 40/10. As I understand it the SKY router gets its up/down speeds using the DHCP parameters from the BT vdsl router......

And the thinkbroadband speed tester is now seeing the change in the Upload speed.

Edited by iand (Fri 05-Oct-12 18:14:20)

In reply to a post by iand:

Actually I have just reset the BT & SKY router (power off / on) and the SKY router is now reporting 40/10. As I understand it the SKY router gets its up/down speeds using the DHCP parameters from the BT vdsl router......

The Sky router gets its info direct from Sky's systems - not from your VDSL modem. Sky's systems get the speed you are sync'd at from Openreach - who get it from the DSLAM at the street cabinet.

And the thinkbroadband speed tester is now seeing the change in the Upload speed.

Great!

Well I'm not so happy now. After a quite a few calls and live chats with Sky, rebooting of router/modem (rqstd by Sky) and retrying all this again after the "patch" update, I'm still stuck on 2Mb up.
Spoke to a very helpful fibre rep at Sky again today who had passed it on to Openreach. Sky and Openreach could both see that my profile was 9996Kb and could not understand why my upload had not increased. BT reset the profile and I my upload sync remained the same and so did my upload speed (grrr).
Apparently both Sky and BT have not encountered this problem before and the Sky rep said if the worst comes to the worst I may have to cease my fibre line and go back onto ADSL and then reorder fibre to see if that clears it.
I wish I had ordered it a bit later, as mid September was the time 2Mb problem had apparently been cleared up. Does anyone have any idea what the problem could be?