sky or bt

trying to choose between the two as cant afford to go to the smaller providers yet currently with bt with phone line but have broadband with sky connection will be used for downloading torrents etc and online gaming

In reply to a post by project_x_uk:

trying to choose between the two as cant afford to go to the smaller providers yet currently with bt with phone line but have broadband with sky connection will be used for downloading torrents etc and online gaming

It depends if you want to keep your BT line. If you go with Sky you will have to switch your line rental to Sky.

Sky. Totally unlimited, torrents are not shaped. Line rental is cheaper than with BT, nothing to loose really.

As you say torrents... Sky

Ring up and they can give you sky unlimited pro which is 80 down and 20 up. £30 a month though

Line rental is cheaper with BT if you pay in advance
If you are downloading Torrents I would suggest you have a VPN in which case the filtering is irrelevant.
You will also be able to use any router with BT as Sky requires MER which isn't widely supported.
So if you don't want to give your money to Sky there are alternatives.

Edited by smouty (Fri 29-Jun-12 14:37:22)

To add anybody who really is getting into torrents a big way should really consider a seed box or some other device that lets you run torrents without your PC.

I have a D-Link NAS enclosure that happily acts as a seed box 24/7

Sky do line rental saver too! You've forgot about that

BT throttle torrents etc!

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

Sky do line rental saver too! You've forgot about that

BT throttle torrents etc!

And Sky is still having massive congestion on quite a few exchanges due to attracting a very large amount of heavy users.

The OP needs to find out what is happening on the local exchange and make a descion.

Also what hasn't been mentioned is Sky's use of a very conservative 7dB noise margin where BT use 6 and DLM can drop it to 3 which can have a significant difference in synch speeds.

That is the problem at the moment between Sky and BT the packages they offer have very different parameters which may not be clear.

Also what hasn't been mentioned is Sky's use of a very conservative 7dB noise margin where BT use 6 and DLM can drop it to 3 which can have a significant difference in synch speeds.

On the other hand, there are many cases where DLM goes wrong leaving people with absurdly low connection speeds. You will see many horror stories here and on the of this happening. The differences between sync speeds for 3 or 7db noise margins are significant and can easily be seen in speed tests, but are probably not much noticed in real life. However, the differences where DLM goes wrong have much larger impact, often leaving people with speeds well below ADSL2 speeds.

Edited by StephenTodd (Fri 29-Jun-12 15:15:25)

I understand but the throughput issues affected ahandful of exchanges.

Sky increased back haul to the affected exchanges. As they did a couple of years ago when throughput issues occurred.

Other ISPs such as Vm run the network into the ground... With sky as soon as an issue with backhaul occurs they act on it & upgrade the backhaul

BT have often had exchanges with over subscription for far longer than sky.

My sky exchange was affected & now I have 80 Mbps fibre which works at full speed 24/7

The throughput issues have been dealt with