Sky Congestion : Kenton Exchange.

A recent change to Sky fibre has turned into a bit of a nightmare. I moved my mum over a couple of weeks ago. I've been monitoring the connection and it's appalling. I believe there is peak time congestion at the exchange.

There seems to be a lot of feedback on the Sky forums regarding congestion.

I'm interested to hear from anyone else on the same exchange (Kenton) - http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/NEK or other exchanges who believe they're seeing peak time congestion.

I've had SmokePing running on my mums connection, results here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mlk2o2fb125ip84/wVCkRUKwNl - I'd like to SmokePing connections of others who think they're having congestion too - will be useful in my fight with Sky.

when I changed to Sky fibre this time last year, the service was appalling, it took them around 8 weeks to resolve. it was purely down to congestion at the exchange!
I did get around £100 back as compensation.

register your complaint with Sky and when its sorted you can ask for money back, I know this does not make up for the terrible service inbetween!

I've seen this problem before back when I was with O2. It took a long time for the capacity to be upgraded. So long infact I switched to Plus Net on a 3 month contract then switched back to O2 as that gave them enough time to fix the issue.

Sky might be reliant on Openreach to upgraded Sky's Ethernet Backhaul Direct service in your exchange. Or Sky could be waiting on a new service delivered as part of their new contract with Virgin Media. Either way it can take 3-6 months from order for the upgrade to actually happen ... yes Openreach can be that slow!

Part of the slowness I suspect is simply down to Openreach ensuring BT retail has the upper hand on its competitors.

This assumes it's a problem with Sky's capacity in the exchange. it could be the GEA cable link (also in the exchange between Sky's rack and backhaul to Openreach's fibre switch that connects all cabinets served by the exchange). Or it might be congestion on the fibre to your individual cabinet. If either of these reasons then ADSL2+ services won't be affected.

Really you need to see ping graphs for a mix of ISP's and cabinets served by the same cabinet as you.

It's far easier for people to set-up a think broadband graph and share this.

See mine for my Sky Fibre at Canterbury in my signature below. The spikes in ping are my SamKnows box testing the line.

In reply to a post by 5km:

Part of the slowness I suspect is simply down to Openreach ensuring BT retail has the upper hand on its competitors.

Openreach have absolute no way of favouring BT Retail over all competitors, they can only favour BT Wholesale over the LLU operators, which they don't.

BTWholesale and LLU operators can use the same EAD product set now. Before they used WES and BES respectively but it's the same product set now if they choose to, and the older products are only available in 2.5Gb and 10Gb flavours and carry some disadvantages over the EAD product set.

Thanks for the feedback so far.

I've set up a TBB Ping monitor now (I didn't think I could on a dynamic IP, turns out it works on Sky ones!) It can be seen here http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/2dd6943fa6f... It's not a pretty sight.

I've already placed an order to move to Plusnet, the fun I'm looking forward to (not) is getting a nice final bill from Sky - thankfully I've informed them of cancellation within 8 working days of the service going live, so, it shouldn't be tooo painful. There is the minor issue that the ADSL contract before moving to VDSL (all with Sky) hadn't run it's course. I'm far from happy. I live far away and it's a logistical challenge doing ISP swaps!

Yeah that confirms what you are seeing with Smoke Ping.

All that matters is the router responds to ping on the WAN interface which it seems to. The default for Sky routers is to not respond but there is the option to enable.

However if your IP changes that the monitor will stop working or start graphing someone else's connection.

Sky can't hold you to the contract if the service is not fit for purpose (as described when sold). Good luck getting them to accept that without having to take it to The Ombudsman Services.

In reply to a post by 5km:

All that matters is the router responds to ping on the WAN interface which it seems to. The default for Sky routers is to not respond but there is the option to enable.

Cheers, the big scary message of "We have detected that your IP address (x.x.x.x) is dynamic.
We do not currently support monitoring of dynamic addresses." has previously had me think that it was not possible to set them up, turns out it is.

Interestingly the SR102 is responding to ping without any adjustment. I also pinged 5 IP addresses higher than the one I'm monitoring, all responded to ping.

In reply to a post by 5km:

Sky can't hold you to the contract if the service is not fit for purpose (as described when sold). Good luck getting them to accept that without having to take it to The Ombudsman Services.

Yeah, should be fun - I need the luck, so far all I've had are two template emails saying I can't cancel until December 2014.

when I had a congestion problems this time last year, sky were happy for me to leave without any fuss, however I couldn't leave at that time as it would have meant losing my phone number etc...
all sorted now though and on my way to BT

good luck

With the 12 month contract with Openreach on FTTC they will be less likely to let people leave penalty free unless there is something very obviously broken.

the joy of congestion is that an ISP may upscale backhaul for the holiday period and then see it under used for the next 12 months.

The thing is though you don't know where the headend is for the fibre cabinets in Kenton (where they are actually physically connected to). It might well be inside a different exchange. So if someone on Sky ADSL in Kenton tells you they are experiencing slowdown at peak time, that information may be completely irrelevant to you.