We can see evidence of the dropping in your line stats, hence the noise margin is a lot higher than it should be. This is the cause of your slow speeds. By lowering your speeds your line can handle more interference without the connection dropping, this shows as a higher noise margin. In my opinion this is akin to masking a problem and not resolving it entirely. So it�s likely something is causing the line to drop that wasn�t there before.
You say you are getting a new connection, that seems quite extreme. Do you mean an entire new line?
Also with regards to your migration away from Be to avoid Sky, you may have jumped the gun a little too soon there. The majority of unhappy users who migrated are those who had slower speeds with Sky than on Be. This only affected users generally who had poor setups (I doubt it would have affected you with a near perfect setup).
This is because Sky used to go for a setup where the line will almost never drop out.
Take a user on o2. They are not in the master telephone socket and are using say a cheap ARGOS phone extension lead. On o2 their broadband may drop out 2 times a day but they get fast speeds.
Now they move to Sky. Sky run line management and this line management literally wants no drop outs. A Sky line very often stays connected for weeks on end. This user who is not in the master socket and had 2 drop outs per day on O2 is now on Sky. On Sky they have a much slower speed, but their line never drops. The user is unhappy with Sky as they see �it�s slower� and they complain. The root of the issue is their setup and not the ISP. Do you now see why some users were so unhappy? 2 different ISPs, 2 different strategies. Like I say Sky was all about stability and reliability over speed. This caused slowdowns for some.
Take another user on O2 or Be. Perfect setup like yourself. When they moved over to Sky they already had a reliable line without dropouts. Sky would train them at a speed the same as they had previously. In some cases if the line was stable enough Sky could actually automatically apply a 3db noise margin and the speeds could be better than it was on o2. So if your setup was right generally it would work out.
Regardless of the line training, users could contact Sky and get a manual speed applied by customer service which virtually always matched their Be and O2 speeds. Of course this would reintroduce the dropouts each day but Sky did set manual profiles if you spoke to customer solutions team� This did granted often result in a slower upload but the download matched more often than not.
These users of course then got the instability reintroduced if their setup remained wrong.
Anyway that�s a history lesson as since all of this Sky have relaxed their standards and now actually give faster speeds� So they now accept those drop outs a lot more. In summary I doubt your line would have been worse with Sky than on Be.
I genuinely think you may have a line fault if the lines dropping out and was not before. However getting an ISP to investigate is almost impossible. If heightening the noise margin stops the dropouts and you�re still above the BT fault threshold speed which is extremely low (often below 1Mbps) you�re stuck.
In terms of the o2 network vs the Sky network, in many respects the network which Be used was inferior to the Sky network. Telefonica which run o2 (even o2 mobile in the UK) and owned the broadband infrastructure have serious debt issues. This means their network was literally starved of investment and traffic management had to be used. They couldn�t afford to upgrade the network to support fibre optic so they ultimately sold it. In terms of the Sky network they took the easynet network which was already very good and invested an unbelievable amount of money into this. Look at it this way, if it�s handling speeds of 80Mbps it�ll easily provide you that 10Mbps without any slowdowns.
This even applies to O2 in terms of their mobile coverage. Noticed with O2 there isn't that much 3G coverage.... Why? Well again telefonica are struggling with their debt issues. This is why on the whole EE has a much better 3G coverage of the UK. O2 aren't in a good financial position.
In terms of vivatchi however they do have brilliant support and I trust and have every faith that they can help you better than a lot of ISPs, they are probably far superior in terms of customer service to Sky. I am currently with BT and trust me they aren�t even 10% of the customer service to Sky though. If I had an issue with Sky and it was ongoing I was assigned a specific customer service representative and had their personal email. So overall not too bad.
If you are getting a new line put in it�s literally a lottery whether it�ll be better. You could be connected to a shorted D-side / E-side, basically meaning the line could be shorter and faster. OR the only available line may be a lot longer and it could be a lot worse. It�s a risk.
EDIT: I realise I've gone off on a tangent here so I hope some of it helps.
To sum up are you getting a new line is that whats happening? I think that's the main question here.
Edited by ukhardy07 (Sun 06-Jul-14 23:50:58)
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. Amongst other things that set a 3dB noise margin.