Sky FTTP - orange voice light of doom!

Hi all.

Are there many Sky Broadband FTTP customers on here?

I was one but left as I, cancelled services due to house renovation and no requirement.

I'm at the point where I'm ready to connect up the Internet again, but am reluctant to go back to Sky FTTP as I used to get an issue where the voice light on the router would turn from green to orange (ONT lights all good) and I would lose connection which would not re-establish itself without manual intervention.

Only solution was a reboot of the router or ONT.

FTTP has always been touted as always on and reliable, but doesn't stand up, at least with Sky involved. I'm informed it's to do with Sky equipment on the servers and addressing, but as I need 24/7 (or as close as possible without having a business line), which ISP is the most reliable?

Do other ISP's on full fibre suffer similar issues?

I'm looking at Zen as a more stable provider.

Thanks all.

Openreach-based FTTP - with a good ISP - is a very, very reliable beast in my experience.

In the 5+ years we’ve had FTTP in Suffolk on various ISP from business like / priced Cerberus to pile them high TalkTalk the only thing that has killed our connection was a tree crashing through the lead-in - even then it still worked for a few days until the strain was too much and it snapped like a guitar string.

Just move to a decent provider.

Well, Sky would not be my first choice, but your experience looks more like a router or VOIP problem than a Sky issue.

They've been rolling out updated firmware to those with the issue but doesn't seem to be working as yet.

Been an issue for a few years it seems, related to hardware that needs replacing on Sky's network.

Not a quick fix but pretty disappointing it isn't closer to being sorted.

As long as you don't have voice services from sky, you do not need to use sky's supplied router. As dfscale said its likely to be a router issue.Mine's only gone down once - red light - for no reason. Others have been power cuts (we get a few a year - joys of the New Forest) and one planned maintenance session..

FTTP will be very stable. The issues you have faced are actually nothing to do with fttp!

Well it was happening regularly, I'm informed by persons who brought up the issue three years previously that it relates to hardware at Sky's end.

Surely if it was related to firmware or software a fix would have materialised already?

I'm not saying FTTP isn't stable, certainly far more than FTTC, I'm just disappointed that the issue is still ongoing.

It seems other ISP's don't have the same issue from my limited research, so Sky need to up their game. I have TV with them so would be good to have it all in one bill, but given security cameras, heating and lighting all being connected, I need it to be as reliable as possible when I'm out for example.

Wouldn't be quite as bad if the m connection could be re-established without having to power cycle the router or ONT.

In reply to a post by giggsy1977:

Well it was happening regularly, I'm informed by persons who brought up the issue three years previously that it relates to hardware at Sky's end.

Surely if it was related to firmware or software a fix would have materialised already?

whilst i stand by what i said, i believe what you have been told is true - (of sorts).

whilst the below is in regards to 3rd party routers, how you get auth'd depends on several factors as they have different kit


https://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Broadband/Third-party-r...

Hi All,



So for our FTTx products (both FTTC and FTTP), we use IPoE instead of PPPoE.



For DHCPv6, nothing special is required, if you setup your CPE router for DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation (PD). About 80%~ of Openreach's network we can authenticate DHCPv6 natively, and then DHCPv4 can piggy back on that.



The remaining 20%, will need to be authenticated based on DHCPv4 (and then DHCPv6 can piggy back on that). For DHCPv4, we require Option 61 to be present, and this just allows us to identify that the DHCP message is coming from the Sky Hub rather than a laptop or client on your LAN.



This isn't actually called "MER", that's a misconception that often causes confusion online. Whilst there are some 3rd party devices that reference this in relation to Sky UK, the majority won't. You're better off just searching for what it actually is, and that's simply the ability to support custom DHCPv4 Option 61 or "Client-ID" values.



The good news is that with FTTP you're just looking for a regular router with ethernet ports, which opens up the market a lot more than those with VDSL2 interfaces.



Hope that helps get you online with your 3rd party router.

Somebody with more knowledge on this maybe can confirm, i suspect, with the sky hub, when it auths it may run into issues authing, it then doesn't try again or try enough times to re-auth, thus you will reboot to try again. So its probably a combination of sky router and sky auth. I was on NowBroadband for a while and I remember a few times being kicked off at around midnight and it could take several minutes for it to reauth.

It's certainly not given me confidence in going back to Sky.
I have a Ubiquiti router to set up when I'm back at home. Someone will be helping me with that for a fee.
I have access points wired in across the house with Cat6 so WiFi is not an issue, just the connection staying on 24/7 so I don't lose control of things in the house when I'm out.

Everything always seems more complicated with Sky than other ISP's!

I'm thinking BT or Zen, which cost a little more but seem to offer more reliability.

Vodafone or Plusnet are also options as they're cheaper and use Openreach network.

Keep hearing about CGNAT and believe it to be a bad thing. Do we know which ISP's use it?

Also look at Aquiss.. Static ipv4 and also ipv6.

What's the advantage of a static IP?