New FTTC install

Hi everyone.

I have just had sky fibre installed this morning after a long long wait.

My estimated speed is 60.7 down and upto 20 up so I went with the sky 40/10 package thinking those speeds would be achievable

Speed tests are floating around the 25 down and 8 up mark. Is there a chance my speed could increase closer to the 40 or is it likely to stay at 25

Thanks for any help

The Sky Hub what speeds does it report for the connection speed?

The authentication filters back the speeds to the router.

Connected via wireless, or direct via ethernet ?

Its a wired connection.

The hub shows
Modem Status Connected
DownStream Connection Speed 40001
UpStream Connection Speed 10000

Ive just ran the speed test at http://speedtest.btwholesale.com/
Download speed (Mbps): 14.12
Upload Speed (Mbps) 8.11
Ping Latency(ms): 31.13

Sounds a little cheeky, but what OS is your machine, and how old is it ?

My crusty old XP machine would never show a download of over 14 meg on FTTC, have had a few other posters on here with similar issues.

Mine was resolved by splashing out on a new desktop !

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/13685...

My XP laptop easily takes 60Mbps on my FTTC line and will run for hours at that rate!

On a LAN transfer it can peak at 700 Mbps!

Even my Win98SE Toshiba can do the 60Mbps

I'm running windows 7 and its 3 years old

It's possible you are connected to an exchange that suffers from the infamous half-speed download issue.

Sky rolled out a patch last week that was supposed to fix the problem, which it did for some but for others it didn't and in some cases it halved the speed again.

I didn't say all of 'em !

According to the OP's replies, the sync rate looks OK, could this be congestion at ISP level maybe ?

Because the sky hub is showing a sync of 40/10 does this mean the connection is ok?

Yes. That's what you ordered .

The throughput is lousy, and the question to be solved is why .

In reply to a post by MHC:

My XP laptop easily takes 60Mbps on my FTTC line and will run for hours at that rate!

but XP can easily run on a Pentium 3 @ 500mhz with a 10megabit Ethernet card, and also on a 3rd Gen Core i7 with a 10gigabit Ethernet PCIexpress card.

In reply to a post by DanoK:

I'm running windows 7 and its 3 years old

And you could have some malware or strangely performing security software. Or a faulty driver.

But its most likely to be the sky half speed issue. Have a look on the SkyUser forum as well - one post there last year implied that if you were to upgrade to the faster service (£30/m instead of £20/m) that might fix it, but it might not :-/

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

The throughput is lousy, and the question to be solved is why .

That question has been around a while:

http://www.skyuser.co.uk/forum/blogs/rammy104/finall...

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1770770

http://www.avforums.com/forums/sky-broadband/1728085...

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/sky/4174567-new-sky...

Trying plugging a PC directly into the modem via ethernet, and follow these instructions to setup a PPPoE connection directly. You will need you sky username/password

Generally Windows 7 fails to connect at the end of the wizard. You will need to then go into start -> Control panel -> network and internet -> network and sharing centre -> change adaptor settings. Right-click on the new connection, and click 'connect'

Re-run the speedtest. If it improves, your router is faulty - request a new one. Otherwise, raise a fault via http://faults.plus.net

In reply to a post by lewisskinner:

Re-run the speedtest. If it improves, your router is faulty - request a new one. Otherwise, raise a fault via http://faults.plus.net

don't you mean report a fault with sky
not plusnet

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

My crusty old XP machine would never show a download of over 14 meg on FTTC,

Surprising! My XP downloads at 17 Meg on a 20 Meg Sync on ADSL.

In reply to a post by lewisskinner:

... You will need you sky username/password
...
Re-run the speedtest. If it improves, your router is faulty - request a new one. Otherwise, raise a fault via http://faults.plus.net

A Sky user and Plusnet faults?

Good for him! A spot of overtime sorting out Sky faults?!

cheers, a

In reply to a post by lewisskinner:

Trying plugging a PC directly into the modem via ethernet, and follow these instructions to setup a PPPoE connection directly. You will need you sky username/password

er, technical fail. Sky doesn't use PPPoE and also has a username/password that are hidden inside the Sky provided router (end user cannot see) that are sent to the network using DHCP option 61.

So main problem is finding a PC DHCP client that can issue DHCP requests with option 61, and harder to get the username/password out of the router - unless you're handy with Wireshark :-/

Thanks everyone you for the help. Having googled "sky fibre half speed" it certainly looks like this is my issue

Strangely though the speed test on this site shows a 38-40 meg download speed while all others report anything between 12-25 meg

I don't know anything about the Sky half-speed problem, but the tbb speed test uses a non-standard port. Maybe on that port there is no issue .

If you can get full speed on one speed test but not on another then it's possibly congestion on Sky's network. This is a symptom of what happens when they have problems.

Try again at 7am, if you can get full speed from most speedtest.net servers (as an example) then congestion is the problem.

We use two ports

Socket over TCP 8095 and pure HTTP over port 80 too these days.

Thanks, I will try some tests early tomorrow morning .

on Sky adsl I never once experienced any speed drop offs, even during peak times. My connection ran at 16 meg at all times

I have opened a help ticket over at sky but reading all the half speed threads over there it seems to a problem that sky know about but are unsure how to fix it