LOSS OF DOWNLOAD SPEED AFTER OPENREACH VISIT

I am looking for some advise please.
Due to poor download speeds on ADSL (SKY) and after 3 months they had not improved matters I intended to change to BT at the end of my contract which was end of January 2017.
I was getting 10 - 12 Mb daytime and as little as 1Mb in the evening.
Sky offered me an upgrade to FTTC free for 12 months with 35 - 40Mb download speeds
Naturally I accepted, nothing to loose, or so I though.
Sky sent me the dual band Q router/modem, although I don't have any Q boxes.
The fibre went live mid morning on 30th January, Router synced at 24862 kbps down and 6611 up.
Speed never dropped below 20Mb in the evenings, I was more than happy with that.
I received a follow up call from SKY on 31st January. The difference between the quoted speed they gave me and what I was getting was mentioned, although I did say that I was more than happy with the new speeds.
The advisor did say that the 24 Mb was well short of what I should get and after going through the various checks he said that he would schedule a Openreach visit to check everything out.
Openreach called on 2nd February, 11am. Everything checked out OK
I was surprised to be told by the engineer that it was impossible to get more than 25Mb download as the cabinet 300 metres from me was not fibre enabled. It was just a link to the the Fibre cabinet 3/4 mile away.
I was also told that SKY had asked for a download connecting target of 18Mb down and 4.9 Mb up.
and I was exceeding that by quite a bit.
Later on that afternoon my connection went down for some 20 minutes then came back on with the router now synced at 21858kbps down and 4911 Kbps up.
Evening (6 - 11pm) speeds have now dropped to below 5Mb and as low as 0.9 Mb. Whereas for 3 days and nights before the re-sync it was never below 20Mb.
SKY will not answer the questions of the request to Openreach for 18Mb down and why now speeds are worse than ADSL.
Their answer is that-everything is controlled by Openreach and there is no more they can do so " I can cancel contract and go elsewhere or revert to ADSL with no penalty"
Any advice would be greatly appreciated and apologies for the long post

You can find out the Openreach estimate for your line by putting your postcode in this DSL checker and selecting your address

http://www.dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/ADSLChecker.Addres...

Thanks Batboy for the Link to Openreach.
Forgive me for being a bit ignorant on the technology side of the internet I'm a mid 70's surfer.
The checker shows VDSL speeds but not Fibre speeds.
I know that it is copper to the fibre cabinet some 3/4 mile away so is that classed as VDSL and will it take up to 10 days for the connection to stabilze

VDSL2 is the technical name for the service, fibre is the marketing term.

The 10 days to stabilize just ignore that, urban myth

The product they offers was probably their up to 38 Mbps service, but the speeds will be dependent on the distance to the fibre cabinet, which from your description is almost a mile away at the speeds the Openreach engineer is talking about are to be expected at that distance.

You should have been told on the phone or in a follow up letter a personalised speed estimate, if not insist on Sky telling you this - it is derived from the checker the other posters shared with you.

The drop from day time to evening speeds may be nothing to do with the connection and may be to do with how busy the service is in the area, have you looked at the connection speed information in the Sky Q Hub (modem).

As the monitoring systems adjust to try and ensure an error free connection, some of this is to slow you down and so some variation is to be expected.

The question to ask yourself, are the speeds letting you do more than you could with ADSL? And is it worth the money? If yes to both then stick with Sky, you probably won't find a cheaper deal than free (was this the unlimited or the 25GB package)

Thanks for the info Andrew.
It is Unlimited Fibre and the synced speeds on the SKY Hub never vary
Any idea why after Openreach visit my hub was re- synced to a lower speed which resulted in evening speeds being worse than ADSL when it ran for 3 days never below 20Mb in the evenings.
The bottom line is that the so called Upgrade to Fibre is no better than the previous ADSL packGE.

So what was the fastest estimate for your line - VDSL Range A ?

In reply to a post by H10ELD:

I was also told that SKY had asked for a download connecting target of 18Mb down and 4.9 Mb up.
and I was exceeding that by quite a bit.

If the engineer told you that he/she shouldn't have. It's absolute nonsense. You will be on the "upto" 38mb package. Your line will connect as fast as it can "upto" that limit. Sky cannot ask for a random lower speed, and why would they.

There are "upto" 18mb packages, but I don't think Sky even sell these. It is also 100% physically impossible to connect above the package limit, so you're definitely on "upto" 38mb.

As for switching to a new ISP, the speed you connect at is also the same with any ISP selling the same package. It all uses the same copper wires to the same cabinet. If you switch ISP they don't even visit the cabinet, but rather "flick a switch" somewhere. The only difference between ISP's being the modem they provide.

Hi Batboy the info you asked is as follows
The fastest speed for VDSL A is 48.4 Mbps
With VDSL B at 35 Mbps
So both of these speeds is way above what my router is set to.
Does that mean that Openreach are deliberately restricting non BT customers speeds.
Just had a text from SKY to say that they will call me between 7 and 8pm tonight, as much information I have to argue my case the better

If BT were doing that, then it would be Openreach and so easy to prove that the court case would have destroyed the BT Group

Could be that the extra bit of fiddlying triggered the DLM to react.

If the sync speeds are not dropping at night, then more likely to be issues in the Sky network

The Sky Q hub has had a mixed reaction from people upgrading i.e. for some it has cost speed - and need to also know if the speed tests are over wired or Ethernet, seen as sync speed is staying constant.

Might get better results from a different vdsl2 modem, without knowing where someone is hard to judge if checkers are being optimistic or pessimistic.

We can see where Sky got their estimate of 35-40 from.

Your line is under-performing well below the estimate. This may be due to external problems the engineer pointed to but may be due to your internal wiring.

External problems are down to Openreach to fix but Sky will have to initiate this.

Internal problems are your responsibility unfortunately

It could just be that the database is plain wrong. The only fix for this is to cancel - and Sky have offered the option to get out of the contract due to speeds being below estimate. Potentially there is no external problem to be fixed - just the laws of physics.

the speed and distance don't quite tally
the speed suggest a lot shorter than that -- how far is your pole / footway box from the premise as that might be part of the issue depending where in the coutry you are as speed is only to the DP

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

In reply to a post by H10ELD:

I was also told that SKY had asked for a download connecting target of 18Mb down and 4.9 Mb up.
and I was exceeding that by quite a bit.

If the engineer told you that he/she shouldn't have. It's absolute nonsense. You will be on the "upto" 38mb package. Your line will connect as fast as it can "upto" that limit. Sky cannot ask for a random lower speed, and why would they.

There are "upto" 18mb packages, but I don't think Sky even sell these. It is also 100% physically impossible to connect above the package limit, so you're definitely on "upto" 38mb.

As for switching to a new ISP, the speed you connect at is also the same with any ISP selling the same package. It all uses the same copper wires to the same cabinet. If you switch ISP they don't even visit the cabinet, but rather "flick a switch" somewhere. The only difference between ISP's being the modem they provide.

The engineer was kind of right. On FTTC faults it usually shows a minimum speed that the engineer should try and achieve. However this comes from the Openreach system, rather than the CP's.

As for the rest of it, worrying about a few meg drop in sync speed is a bit pointless, it's probably nothing. I'd be more concerned that the issues only occur at night. That would point to a problem in Sky's network. Rather than Openreach's. but sadly I've never spoken to anyone at Sky that seems to understand that it's possible they may have congestion in their own network.

Edited by deleted (Mon 13-Feb-17 13:32:38)

Thanks to everyone who has replied to my post.
Update :-
Sky did not call back as promised on Saturday evening.
My SKY Q modem is connected to the Master Socket via a pre- filtered faceplate. There are no extension off the master
Openteach said that my line test showed it had a high quality clean connection to the first cabinet some 300 metres away then it goes to the Fibre cabinet about 1/2 mile away.
My incoming line comes from a sunken box in the pavement outside my front door. Each house in the estate has a box in the pavement outside their property.
I live in Cirencester, Gloucestershire so its not a rural location.
I am doing my speed checks via a CAT 5 ethernet connection with the Wireless Access Point switched off
With the Openreach checker for address and postcode it states a Downstream Figure of 35 -48 Mbps and Upstream of 6.9 - 10.1 Mbps I am getting well short of that.
The router is Synced at 24706 Down and 5063 Up and that never varies even when I get less than 1Mb in the evening.
I now feel that I am causing SKY too much grief and they don't want to know any more about my problem
Not a good way to treat a customer who has been with them for over 15 years and is giving them £112 a month for their services.

Stop focusing on the Openreach side of things and don't let Sky fob you off. This really does sound like an issue in Sky's own network, not the Openreach cabling between your house and the fibre headend.