New Sky Fibre Connection

Hi,

Just been connected to Sky Fibre today - happy to at last be getting more than the 2mb I've been on for the past decade.

But - the BT checker said this:

"downstream line speed of 34.6Mbps and upstream line speed of 6Mbps."

I am getting - wired directly to the Sky Router - no more than 24

The router is showing close to a 40MB connection

DownStream Connection Speed 39992 kbps
UpStream Connection Speed 9996 kbps

I've read a bit about some dodgy Sky routers limiting speeds - should I just sit tight for the next ten days or so?

You're on the 40/10 product. Good sync. Wholesale checker is often conservative.

But testing only shows a connection of about 25 - contrary to the box.

I know some other people in the street who had BT Infinity install this morning - they are seeing 40mbps on the same tests.

Infinity and Sky Fibre differ greatly as soon as the data hits the exchange.

Have you looked at the graphs from the speedtest, it may be peaking at close to 36 Meg, but the average is lower. A lot of people use speedtest.net which reports the burst and they ignore the graph which shows a true picture.

Are you using WiFi or wired? Which speed test sites are you using?

Try BT Speedtest, BBMax and Speedtest.net

That's news to me, I have observed that peak you mentioned on some tests.

If that's the case, is it a better or worse situation?
Or just differen

There is a LOT of talk on the Sky forums about a half-speed problem and there seems to be an acknowledged issue with Sky too.

Are there any useful references? This is all greatly appreciated, btw.

Edited by deleted (Wed 31-Oct-12 14:36:34)

Is the "half speed" problem not their tendancy to put people on the 40/10 rather than the 80/20 product?

This is more likely to be simply an issue whereby comparing speedtest results on different ISPs always tends to give diffent results?

I am wired directly

speedtest.net gives me 26/8.4

BT gives me 28/6.7

This place gives me 20/5

In reply to a post by greenglide:

Is the "half speed" problem not their tendancy to put people on the 40/10 rather than the 80/20 product?

This is more likely to be simply an issue whereby comparing speedtest results on different ISPs always tends to give diffent results?

Well my box is synced at 40 but the fastest I can get a test to return is 25 , so not in this case or in similar examples on the Sky forums.

http://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Sky-Fibre-Broadband/Half...

Sit tight, I was connected just under a week ago, graph from install here

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/user/showspeedgraph/id...

You'll see it started off a little conservative, to be honest after being on 3mb down 0.5mb up for the last 6 years, I don't care too much!

Still getting used to the ridiculously fast speeds!

The router only grabs the data after a DHCP cycle, so turning router off and on (leave openreach modem ON) will double check those figures.

To see the difference in speed tests you need to look at the graphs of throughput, hence why we added one to the flash tester http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/broadband.html

Which also rules out differences that java throws into the mix sometimes.

Sustained tests via two or more simultaneous file downloads and checking throughput via task manager or a tool like our own tbbMeter http://www.thinkbroadband.com/tools.html

Which also has a variety of tests run into it that you can run.

That link shows the blank background to the graph not your data points.

Whoops!

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/843/31102012150...

In reply to a post by distantdave:

Well my box is synced at 40 but the fastest I can get a test to return is 25 , so not in this case or in similar examples on the Sky forums.

You could be suffering the "half speed" issue - there is a lot of talk on that on the SkyUser forums.

The only way to be sure and see the actual sync is to unlock your Openreach modem, but you DO NOT want to touch the Openreach modem until Saturday if you were installed today. As RobertoS told me, the Openreach DLM is watching the line very carefully until then and you don't want it to do anything silly.

Rebooting the Sky router is fine, its the openreach white box you don't want to touch.

Sky is the only ISP that provides sync information in their router, which is good, but they don't make it clear it only updates when the Sky router is rebooted. (again, don't touch the modem!).

Almost like Sky is running some odd form of DLM isn't it

I didn't know if it was that or something else, I have seen other speedtesters give me the full speed, whereas tbb speedtester sometimes peaks out at say 30mb when the other one would go to the full?

How would I test to see?

First stage is to double check the results e.g. if using 100 Meg Ethernet link (e.g. Sky routers) task manager should show 30% for the speed in the network tab.

The speed there is a bit higher than you would see from a file transfer due to protocol overheads.
you can also easily compare different speedtests.

Also we are finding more people are having Java problems (and we have changed nothing), changes are on their way to the flash tester.

Now at home so done the test on bt site http://diagnostics.bt.com/login/?workflow=Speed

I got:
Download speed 37.8Mb
Upload speed 8.19Mb

I don't have Java problems, but I regularly see the think broadband speedtester not giving an accurate upload (almost seems maxed out), for instance I just carried out a speed test and got 5.8mbps upload, I know my line hits 8.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results/id/1...

http://speedtest.xilo.net/result/186927/

Spoke to Sky this am.

Just got 35.54 on the BT Speed Tester - which was previously showing 27-29.
This is exactly what I was predicted to get.

speedtest.net still shows 25- 27, and this place consistently shows 20.
Odd that the speed on one checker have risen so much an in isolation.

But as that's Sky's preferred checker, I suppose I can't grumble now!

I've also fiddled with a few settings and I'm seeing a definite improvement - one even nexceeding my top speed(!)

To be honest I'm getting a baffling array of results.
This place definitely has the most consistent (ly low) tester though.

What other settings did you fiddle with, are they worth going through?

Happy with my 40/10 connection, few sites a limited on download, I don't want to upgrade to 80/20 for another year anyway, that way it will feel like an improvement again

I fiddled with DNS and a few other things and saw some brief improvement (I am even seeing different speeds depending on which browser I used)

But now, even the BT tester is back down to 27 again.
Not getting what I expected - can I jump to BT instead?

Edited by deleted (Fri 02-Nov-12 21:00:38)

No, I would take it up with sky, how long has it been connected, don't know if shutting everything off then restarting would help. But if there is an issue on the line, moving to BT won't make any difference anyway.

Its the half speed bug, someone else jumped to BT and got full speed straight away, the post is on here somewhere.

I had mine installed on Monday and am getting roughtly 25/6 speeds BUT... if I go on steam and try to download a free game or demo, I get 4.6Mbs which is above 4Mbs limit, I also downloaded a download manager as chrome or IE dont show the download speeds, I started to download a game demo and was getting 4.9Mbs !
On Utorrent I can only get 2.4Mbs downloads, BUT uploads can get as high as 1.2Mbs again above the max.
Its all a bit confusing, Can you try "Internet download manager" free version, then go to file planet and download a largish demo and see what speeds you get ? or try steam

Edited by garbageguy (Wed 14-Nov-12 21:06:25)

I downloaded call of duty via Steam the other night, downloads sat at 4.5Mbs.

I am on the 40/10 connection for £20 a month.

Thats a good speed its just downloads from browsers that are slower than expected, maybe thats the whole prob with Sky half speed, browsers?

Edited by garbageguy (Sat 17-Nov-12 09:04:25)

From what i gathered

its something to do with an ip layer problem (this is what one sky cs told me)

4 months ago i mite add

maybe its something else

there was a post on half speed thread on sky forums saying they *might* have found a fix

though i wouldn't cross my fingers just yet as they said something similar 2-3 months ago.

Also i'm the one who changed from sky to bt and got full speed

i just couldn't find a solution to my problem and had enough waiting

anyways full speed at the moment 2 weeks in

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2316568671.png

Edited by epyon (Sun 18-Nov-12 21:10:09)

out of curiosity which server are you testing with on speedtest.net when i go to the site it highlights the leeds server for some reason even though im in essex on that server i get no more then 25megs if i switch to a london server i get 38 megs

Edited by deleted (Sun 18-Nov-12 23:09:00)

With the flash tester I see 4Mbps which is ridiculous. I get 70 quite easily everywhere else.

A good tester I find http://speedtester.bt.com/beta/

The only way to be sure and see the actual sync is to unlock your Openreach modem, but you DO NOT want to touch the Openreach modem until Saturday if you were installed today. As RobertoS told me, the Openreach DLM is watching the line very carefully until then and you don't want it to do anything silly.

The Sky router gets the same data as the modem. The sync showed at 192.168.0.1 in the sky router is identical to anything shown in the openreach modem. Tried and tested.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

The Sky router gets the same data as the modem. The sync showed at 192.168.0.1 in the sky router is identical to anything shown in the openreach modem. Tried and tested.

The Openreach modem CAN resync but the Sky router only updates when its power cycled - as the sync information is pulled from Sky's systems, not from the openreach modem.

Like that tester, it shows. as opposed to this.

Something weird goes on with the tbb meter on the upload.

I also don't understand how one can be different of 3mb download and 2mb upload?

Especially when these speedtests back up what the BT one is telling me

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2318718445.png

http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/results/178180291.png

Edited by deleted (Mon 19-Nov-12 20:53:35)

Hmmm never really looked into it but something to do with the routing of traffic.

i only use xilos or namesco servers the rest can't handle the speed.

I tried the BT Beta and got 38Mbs, but the thinkBroadband showed 23Mbs, while namesco on speedtest.net showed 36Mbs, its all confusing, my speeds seem to have rised by about 5-10Mb since instal last week

Did you double check the graph profile from the speed tests?

If it is variable, rather than a nice flat line, then to be expected to see a variation as not all tests show the same number, some are a burst, some an average and some something in between.

The variation of 5% that was present on 0.5 Mbps connections due to various factors is still there with fast connections, which means at 30 Mbps a 5% variation can be the difference between a 28 Meg result or 32 Meg result.

I have been spending a lot of time testing lately and are finding some tests that actually go faster than the connection I am using. Then other days you can test on one tester and get wildly varying results, when the day before it was a stable as a lump of gold.

We use 1024 currently, but know the others use 1000 which explains why when displaying Mbps we are often slower.

We are going to merge with the rest of the world, which will probably have people thinking we suddenly got 5% faster, and a raft of other changes are on the way. A key aim is to provide information so people can see enough information to understand the result if they so wish.

Files are downloading at around 2392.1 kb/s using Opera and via direct ethernet.

This suggest around a 20mb connection, does it not?

If by kb/s you mean Kilo Bytes per second then yes

VERY often the place you are downloading from is the bottleneck.

E.g. even apple and microsoft sometimes cannot max out my connection.

Download 3 files at once from different reliable sources. Add them up. If this totals 20Mbps I would say there's a problem. Otherwise it's probably just that the servers are slower than 40Mbps due to congestion etc.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Mon 03-Dec-12 22:31:46)

Yup - three sources - between 1668 and 2392 down.

I quit sky for Plusnet - looks like I made a great decision .

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/plusnet/t/4203930-r...