Too good to be true

"Hello this is the engineer from BT I'm coming to install your broadband."
Me: "But I'm moving to Sky."
Engineer: "I know. Sky have no engineers so they pay BT to do their
installations."

So he turns up right at the appointed time, installs a BT Openreach wall
plate, plugs in a BT Openreach modem and away it goes. The only Sky part
of the system is the WiFi unit which also worked straight out of the box.

I told the engineer that Sky's line test had shown I would get 13Mbps. He said that with my distance from the cabinet I would be lucky to get 10Mbps, but when he
did the speed test he got 23Mbps over his WiFi connection. He seemed
amazed but assured me it should remain at that level and would be even
faster on my PC hard-wired to the modem. He was right. The speed test I
did showed an average download speed of 25.83Mbps and upload of 4.3Mbps.

Bit of a change from 0.9Mbps and even lower upload speed on previous
non-fibre connection.

My questions: Is he correct about the speed staying at approximately that level or will Sky quietly throttle me back to 13? I've never heard of anyone getting double their predicted speed, it's usually less than. Anyone any idea how this might have happened?

In reply to a post by deeor2013:

My questions: Is he correct about the speed staying at approximately that level or will Sky quietly throttle me back to 13? I've never heard of anyone getting double their predicted speed, it's usually less than. Anyone any idea how this might have happened?

Sky will not throttle you. The original 13 was an estimate of the best your line can do and so far it appears to have been pessimistic. Everyone will be pleased for you.

However..

If yours is a recently installed cabinet you can expect a slight speed drop over the next six months. This is because as more and more of your neighbours sign up you will begin to be affected by crosstalk (other lines interfering with yours). There is strong evidence that BT's estimates take this into consideration and therefore you might end up closer to the 13Mb/s estimate. It seems unlikely though - 23 to 13 is a big drop and I wouldn't think crosstalk would be that bad.

So...

Your speed will probably drop a little over the next six months but hopefully not by much and it won't be because Sky are throttling you.

Thanks, that's comforting . The cabinet is a rural one installed a couple of years ago but does appear to serve a wide area.

You may also find your speeds drop over the next couple of days. If there are many errors on the line then the DLM (dynamic line management) will apply varying levels of interleaving to correct those errors. The end result is you'll have less errors but a slower connection.

No, I've read people are predicted 40/50Mbps but some of them achieve max (80Mbps) syncs and some around 70Mbps.

I know people who have got well under their predicted speeds so it's really hit and a miss. Though I doubt it will stay at the same speed, as crosstalk increases (more people subscribe to FTTC) you will slowly see your speed degrade.

In reply to a post by ryant704:

as crosstalk increases (more people subscribe to FTTC) you will slowly see your speed degrade.

That's not necessarily how crosstalk works. You can have many connections that do nothing to your speed, then one further line is connected that interferes badly with yours and drops your speed significantly. There was a recent thread on here where someone lost 20% of his downstream sync speed in one go.

BT Openreach are experimenting with vectoring, which will help to eliminate the effect of crosstalk. Unfortunately, deployment still looks to be some way off.

In reply to a post by ryant704:

No, I've read people are predicted 40/50Mbps but some of them achieve max (80Mbps) syncs and some around 70Mbps

Depend on your high quality of modem/router

Sky will never throttle you down however that 13Mbps estimate is based on crosstalk being in place. Right now you may not have much crosstalk hence you are syncing much faster.

In time a neighbour or somebody may get fibre like you, BAM, this one person may introduce crosstalk onto your line. Crosstalk isn't usually gradual, it's normally very sudden. An example is you may get 23Mbps now and then an hour later it's down to 13Mbps. It wouldn't be a fault if it was crosstalk that had caused it.

So yes that speeds nice for now but don't be shocked if it suddenly drops down nearer the estimate. It has a chance to do this on any ISP. Sky will not throttle you down though. Like any ISP sky uses openreach which although retaining the BT logo etc is entirely different to the BT retail devision which sells BT broadband.

So Sky is at no disadvantage over BT here. All ISPs are treated equally by openreach, the best way to imagine openreach is as a company which maintains the infrastructure & to treat it in your mind as seperate to BT broadband etc.

Depend on your high quality of modem/router

??????????? This is just incorrect ?????????

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Depend on your high quality of modem/router

When are you going to stop posting such utter rubbish? You've been on these forums long enough now to know the basics, yet you constantly post totally wrong information, utter rubbish!

People come on here looking for answers, they may find yours and take it as the truth, and then they go away misinformed!

That means someone else then has to come along and correct what you've posted, wasting their time!

I should think the regulars are all getting pretty much fed up with it, I know I am.

To set the record straight the biggest thing which affects the speeds anybody will get is line length, followed by quality of line, cross talk and other interference, I should think the quality of your modem/router has very little to do with it.

Edited by R0NSKI (Sun 20-Oct-13 10:31:43)