Sky's loss leading catches up on them

We all know Sky has a loss leading broadband product - just look at their prices!

My connection is still great but apparently, in some areas of the country, they've run out of capacity and users are experiencing high levels of congestion.

I was saddened to see the news article I'm on about, as I have always respected Sky for maintaining their level of service at the size of their broadband customer base.

What are your thoughts on this news?

In reference to www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/22/sky_broadband_adding_customers_fir...:

"Following a combination of an underlining increase in network traffic as well as an especially high rate of new customer additions, we are aware of capacity issues in a limited number of exchanges."

The company has promised to build in extra capacity at choked-up phone-line exchanges: "We are aware of the issue and are adding new capacity to those exchanges as soon as we can. We apologise to all customers who have been impacted by this issue."

Probably just exchanges that still just had 1Gig links, and will be moved to 10GigE very soon.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Probably just exchanges that still just had 1Gig links, and will be moved to 10GigE very soon.

I wonder if their backhaul suppliers have let them down on scheduled upgrades - maybe pushed out circuit deliveries by another 30 to 60 days or more :-/

In reply to a post by Xplosion:

We all know Sky has a loss leading broadband product - just look at their prices!

Quite similar to the prices of Talktalk and Plusnet really. Are they all loss leading?

Sky have had capacity issues before and have been refreshingly open about it - and then fixed it. Better than other ISPs that I've been with that have become clogged - they just denied it and then introduced draconian throttling.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Probably just exchanges that still just had 1Gig links, and will be moved to 10GigE very soon.

I suspect part of this may be a balancing act going on between not wanting to order (and pay for) unnecessary capacity, and the lead time for upgrading backhaul circuits - though the issue in some areas may be unavailability of 10GigE circuits. I would have thought that increasing data volumes make it a 'no brain' decision to aim to upgrade backhaul to 10GigE in advance of offering FTTx. If this backhaul is via a managed circuit which has bandwidth charges, it should be relatively cheap to upgrade the bearer to 10GigE and enable extra capacity as required with relatively short lead times.

I'm always amazed at how loudly people complain in stories in The Register and similar about outages on cheap consumer ISPs when their expectations are unrealistic. If you're taking overtime to work from home, you should have two different forms of Internet access that are as diverse as possible - one of these can be tethering a mobile phone or a PAYG mobile broadband dongle, so may cost very little if rarely used. Internet access matters to us - we've got Zen FTTC, my contract O2 mobile broadband account and I can tether my contract Vodafone mobile phone.

I've considered putting cheap consumer ADSL on our other BT line so that I can implement auto-failover on my router. This would protect me against failure of the FTTx system, also, if I choose a provider using LLU, against a BT Wholesale outage, though not against failure of the twisted pair network between the PCP and our NTE5s. The other alternative would be seeing if Virgin are prepared to add their cheapest broadband product to our cable account at minimal extra expense, though I was most unimpressed with cable broadband when I had it.


If quality of service matters for home working, I'd think there was justification for your main ISP being one of the business orientated ones (such as AAISP, IDnet or Zen). These providers don't operate on such tight margins, so have more of a cushion to try their best to ensure users don't experience contention serious enough to cause packet loss or excessive jitter.

Edited by deleted (Tue 22-Jan-13 20:51:48)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Probably just exchanges that still just had 1Gig links, and will be moved to 10GigE very soon.

Cheaper to add a second GigE than move straight to 10 from 1 and that's standard. Provisioning 10Gb costs in terms of hardware either side of Sky's network as well as Openreach price, GigE ports are cheap and plentiful.

Cheaper but if the expectation is that 2 x 1GigE will run out soon too the the big leap may make more sense.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Probably just exchanges that still just had 1Gig links, and will be moved to 10GigE very soon.

Cheaper to add a second GigE than move straight to 10 from 1 and that's standard. Provisioning 10Gb costs in terms of hardware either side of Sky's network as well as Openreach price, GigE ports are cheap and plentiful.

I took MrSaffron to be talking about the backhaul links, not GEA links. Are GEA links even offered on 10GigE - I thought they were always GigE, though you may need multiple links for the entire FTTx infrastructure on the larger aggregation nodes.

Obviously, the situation with backhaul depends on what Sky are renting in each case - if they're renting dark fibre with a limited number of spare pairs that is of suitable specification for 10GigE, it should be cheap to upgrade the link to 10GigE - 10GigE optics and switch ports are now relatively cheap assuming that the switch fabric is 10GigE capable. If they're renting a leased line and the provider doesn't have 10GigE infrastructure, multiple GigE may be the way to go for now - but with increasing roll-out of up to 80Mbit/second FTTC, also FTTP destined to move more into the mainstream, adding backhaul in units of 1Gbit may seem shortsighted.