Apparently I've been moved onto a 3dB profile!

I have seen others mention that the Sky DLM will put you on this if your line is deemed capable.

I managed to catch this from the event log earlier

xDSL linestate up (ITU-T G.992.5; downstream: 16077 kbit/s, upstream: 1304 kbit/s; output Power Down: 18.6 dBm, Up: 12.1 dBm; line Attenuation Down: 32.5 dB, Up: 19.4 dB; snr Margin Down: 3.1 dB, Up: 3.0 dB)

The upstream is notable in the increase from 1117kb/s (from memory) to 1304kb/s.

For clarity, I am an ex O2 user using a WB5 and never used Annex M.

Nice. My own line can't handle less than 6 dB downstream, but I would certainly like to have 6 dB upstream rather than the 9 dB I have always had on Sky.

I just got a 3dB downstream profile with fastpath after a live chat.
Ian do you have a sky phone line as your upstream is much better than my 1115kb/s...

No, it's a Post Office line. (should have mentioned that in the OP!)

In reply to a post by IanBB:

No, it's a Post Office line. (should have mentioned that in the OP!)

That's certainly relevant because the kit used in the two instances is different.

What make and model router are you using?

It's a Technicolor TG582n (O2 Wirelessbox 5)

It was a BT line when Sky took over the broadband (March) and about a month later transferred to The Post Office.

I can't recall any downtime when the transfer took place and at that time my upload speed was stuck at 1117Kbs.

Digging deeper line testing was started on my line on 3rd June.

Well, I've just got the 3 dB treatment today too, resulting in "record" speeds. Downstream has jumped from 18.7 meg to 19.7 meg, and upstream has hit 1.3 meg for the very first time. And all that on a 29 dB downstream attenuation.

Very happy that Sky have finally managed to configure 1.3 meg upstream on my connection.

wow

i take these are sync speeds and not throughput?

even so on 25db i struggled to get 17000 on 3db with clean wiring inside my house anyways

but my upload was always 1425 (on every isp) kind of strange.

In reply to a post by epyon:

i take these are sync speeds and not throughput?

Yes, synch speeds.

In reply to a post by epyon:

even so on 25db i struggled to get 17000 on 3db with clean wiring inside my house anyways

Yeah, I've always had decent synch speeds for my attenuation, but my noise margin has fluctuated more in the last few years and I've ruled out noise sources within my own house.

Edited by Oliver341 (Fri 13-Jun-14 20:58:05)

Just noticed this in My Sky:

Testing on your broadband connection began on 10/06/2014 and will be completed within 10 days.

I may have jumped the gun with my excitement, it seems line testing has been restarted and may very well end up settling on my old speeds in the end. I guess I'll find out in the next 7 days.

Nice, I wonder if this is being rolled out across the board?

In reply to a post by IanBB:

Nice, I wonder if this is being rolled out across the board?

I've seen my connection run through line testing without me prompting it, once or twice a year. I'm just wondering if the DLM has been programmed with new line profiles this time. I'll have to see what speeds I have when it ends.

In My Sky, what does it list as your last line testing date?

I mentioned above, it says line testing started on 3/6/14 so should just be about finished.

This is the 1st time that line testing has occurred, it never happened at the initial changeover.

In reply to a post by IanBB:

I mentioned above, it says line testing started on 3/6/14 so should just be about finished.

This is the 1st time that line testing has occurred, it never happened at the initial changeover.

Ah right. Could be a global trigger for line testing then, if the line profiles have been updated and they want every connection re-assessed for the new profiles.

Generally if you go 26 hours without a synch drop, line testing has stopped.

I wonder if that's why they started DLM again on my line. I was 3dB to start with, on a 17,000 synch speed. Now its 15,353 on a reported interleave of 384 (I didn't think it went that high).

Upload synch is now 1,360 (was 1100 or so) so the same as my Be account used to be.

Could be related to a bump in upstream speed in the line profiles, yeah. It's been a long time bug-bear on Sky.

This is me raising it over 3 years ago: http://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Archived-Discussions/Rai...

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

Generally if you go 26 hours without a synch drop, line testing has stopped.

It's well past that time for me without a resynch.
What I have noticed is that although I'm synched higher 22306/1115 with the 3dB profile, most of the different speed tests don't seem to reflect the increased speed of the line, regardless of time of day that they are done..

36 hours since my last resynch, 3 dB downstream noise margin has held. 19,989 kbps down, 1,295 kbps up, 29 dB d/s attenuation. I've never hit 19 meg on Sky before, let alone almost hit 20 meg.

All that remains is to see if the 3dB NM can hold on my connection in the longer term, so far so good.

It's not just synch speeds either. 9 ms average ping to BBC, previously it was over 20ms. The change in my connection is really eye-opening.

Text

1 23 45 67 89 1011 1213 1415 1617 18

C:\>ping -n 10 bbc.co.uk  Pinging bbc.co.uk [212.58.246.104] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=57Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=57 Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=57Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=57 Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=57Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=57 Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=57Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=57 Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=57Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=57  Ping statistics for 212.58.246.104:     Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:     Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 10ms, Average = 9ms

Yep as DLM has deemed the line more stable it can also reduce the interleaving depth which gives lower pings. A higher interleaving depth gives higher pings but prevents the line dropping as much and prevents error build up... So your lines probably quite good.

It's why it's hard to compare one persons sky with anothers, as the differences are likely due to one line being better than the other.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

Yep as DLM has deemed the line more stable it can also reduce the interleaving depth which gives lower pings. A higher interleaving depth gives higher pings but prevents the line dropping as much and prevents error build up... So your lines probably quite good.

I think it's more than just an individual random line test on my part, and much improved line conditions for my individual line. Judging by the number of reports, it looks like Sky are much more aggressively pushing out faster line profiles with low noise margins and low interleaving depths than they ever were before. They've also reconfigured the upstream limits which were always set artificially low before now.

I expect the new profiles is being rolled out by exchange.

Edited by Oliver341 (Sun 15-Jun-14 23:05:25)

Are these type of line tweaks limited to their Braodcom kit or does it work with their Easynet kits too?

Good question.

We're not even sure as to where these changes have came from yet!

Well I contacted Sky via live chat and it seems it must work on both kits. I am now on the 3db profile but the Easynet kit I think still adds 1.5db to the upload by default as that is on 4.5db. Anyway good improvement, almost on the old speeds I had when I was on Be There.

Now I wonder if the option to change via live chat is only available to Sky Broadband Pro customers?

I'm not a Pro customer and the change just happened.

Perhaps but my experience of DLM is as follows.

Initial DLM puts you on a speed that's extremely stable but conservative. On some lines this can be a 3db noise margin but rarely... After a few months of stability it reruns and this time is far less conservative as it has a history of the line not dropping.

Perhaps the people moving from be and o2 have just been connected long enough so that now DLM is rerunning and giving better speeds. As Sky switched people over in bulks this would mean these people are all getting this occur at a similar time... This has virtually always been the case in my experience with DLM. I doubt they have suddenly changed it, could be wrong though.

I got around 13Mbps first time, a few months later I got 15Mbps. I'm on fibre now so hard to tell if things have changed. Most people eventually end up on good speeds with Sky if the lines stable. They are just slow and conservative to roll out those speeds, going for stability and users lines have to be stable to see those improvements. DLM in some respects is always there, monitoring for changes.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Mon 16-Jun-14 18:12:38)

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

Perhaps the people moving from be and o2 have just been connected long enough so that now DLM is rerunning and giving better speeds.

How does that explain Oliver's sudden change?

Ahhh I had assumed probably wrongly that he came from be too. Well it would be about time Sky gave better speeds it would make a fair few people happier.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

Ahhh I had assumed probably wrongly that he came from be too. Well it would be about time Sky gave better speeds it would make a fair few people happier.

I'm am indeed ex-O2, but I moved to Sky 3.5 years ago

Certainly feels like the Sky DLM system has been reprogrammed to be much more "generous" with speeds than it has in the past. Judging by my noise margin variations there's nothing to suggest my line is considerably less noisy that it has been over the last 3.5 years, and I have manually requested line testing to be re-started on a few occasions just to see whether the end profile increases, and it never has. Add to that the fact that upstream is hitting 1.3 meg these days as opposed to the previous global maximum of 1.15 meg is a strong indication Sky have altered the DLM system somehow.

My gut feeling is that Sky are updating things exchange by exchange and then kicking off DLM so that the new improved profiles can be applied. Unfortunately it will be hard to determine whether people's speeds on ADSL2+ are indeed increasing globally on Sky, since people only tend to say anything when their speeds decrease.

Whilst this is largely a good thing, the initial reasoning for a strict DLM was to ensure stability was foremost important. To be honest with so many people having poor internal wiring setups I believe the idea of stability over speed was a good approach.

If suspicions are right and all of a sudden Sky DLM becomes much more generous we may see more complaints. Why? Well a lot of people do not use the master socket, have some cheap Argos DIY extension lead (usually flat cable) or may have star wiring. A strict DLM meant that these users got slower speeds with Sky than they would with say O2 but this also meant that Skys line did not drop out, whereas O2 with a faster speed probably would have dropped out more often.

Now if Sky DLM becomes generous and suddenly drops all of these peoples noise margins and gives them better speeds they will suddenly start complaining about disconnections. They will take the attitude of 'it was fine before and it's not now' and immediately blame the ISP when actually their setup has been awful all along. Try telling the customer that though, chances are they will just switch providers and the issues will no doubt follow them or they will get banded at a very low speed by another ISP and assume again, in ignorance that their setup is fine... The saga continues

Edited by ukhardy07 (Tue 17-Jun-14 02:39:45)

Of course it depends how much more generous the new line profiles are. Although it might make it more likely that people will be given 3 dB, I strongly suspect the system will still give 6 dB to lines that can't handle 3 dB.

However 3 dB on a noisy line still isn't a disaster. Let's say a customer's line is noisy and only supports 10 meg @ 3 dB (on a bad day).

On a good day, customer has 12 meg @ 3 dB and the line gets noisy and drops. When the line re-synchs the noise will be taken into account and the line will come back up at 10 meg @ 3 dB. The line will then stay up because the noise on the line has been taken into account during the re-synch.

I also suspect that if noise on the line started to drop the line frequently, line testing would re-start and quite possibly assign a 6 dB profile due to the noise.

From My Sky:

Line connection testing completed on 16/06/2014, resulting in the following settings:

Download speed setting
Your connection has been set to a download speed of up to 22.0Mbps .

Upload speed setting
Your connection has been set to an upload speed of up to 2.6Mbps .

The upstream cap is interesting, I haven't got Annex M enabled on my line, but the upload speed setting is certainly suggestive of it.

Interesting

wasnt sure they were going to offer it.

In reply to a post by koolkp3:

Well I contacted Sky via live chat and it seems it must work on both kits. I am now on the 3db profile but the Easynet kit I think still adds 1.5db to the upload by default as that is on 4.5db. Anyway good improvement, almost on the old speeds I had when I was on Be There.

I am connected to the Easynet kit too, and I am now on the same profile as you. My upstream has improved to a bit over 1.0mb/s, but it's still not close to the 1.3mb/s I had from BE. Could you confirm what upstream sync speed you're getting now and whether it's fastpath or interleaved, and what modem you're using?

Thanks.

Over a month ago, I spoke to an ex-Be guy on the Pro team and asked to be put on fastpath; my synch speed went up from 19.5 to 21.5Mbps downstream. The upstream went up only slightly from 0.95 to 1.1Mbps. Also, the latency improved dramatically e.g. ping to bbc.co.uk used to be around 17ms and now it is 5ms. However, the various speedtests at different times still do not reflect the above-mentioned speeds.

MySky reports 24Mbps and 1.3Mbps on my profile. I am using a Draytek Vigor 2820n with the latest firmware. Also, I was told at the time that DLM cannot be running concurrently with the fastpath profile. Ocassionally, the noise margin also drops from 3db to 2db, which is probably too low and might be the cause of dropouts. However, I can live with the fact that the service is finally usable - even though it is not the same as Be.

In reply to a post by johnnycab:

However, the various speedtests at different times still do not reflect the above-mentioned speeds.

I have to agree with this finding.
I initially synched at just under 20Mb and now with a 3dB snr at just over 22Mb but haven't seen any real world increase in speed testing results.

Just looked at mine. I'm pretty sure I was on 6. I'm now on 2.8.

Uptime says 371 hours.

It's a pity I can't release the upstream. That's still stuck at 8.8 &1172kbps.

go on reboot the router and see what you can get. You know you want to. I never reboot my router, I just wait for the power cuts every 3 months to do all reboots

I was switched from O2 to Sky Broadband Pro Unlimited in March this year. Further line testing was carried out a month ago, with the downstream connection speed being set at 19 meg. The actual speed is 18.5 meg. The SNR is about 4.5 meg.

I used to get at least 21.5 meg downstream speed with O2, with no dropouts, with help from SNR adjustments made via my Billion router (this doesn't work with Sky). I have a quiet, stable line, I am less that 3/4 of a mile from the exchange, and I recently had an Openreach engineer check and refurbish all my household wiring and equipment.

It seems clear to me that Sky is not giving me the speed of which my line is capable. I've raised this with them several times via the helpline; this results in a temporary improvement, then the lower speed comes back again.

What should I do, please? Are things likely to improve if I simply wait? Many thanks.

you have done from a 'specialist' ISP who could/would adjust the ADSL settings until every last drop of speed was there to a 'mass market' ISP who uses general settings to get the best speed for most people. SKY look to have changed some of their standards to get a bit more speed to keep the O2/BE customers more happy, but in the end you get what you get.

You need to decide if you actually need the 'missing' speed, and if you do, who you could move to (or not) that can give this to you.

The way I am now looking at ADSL, you can move between ISP suppliers for cost/extra's/discounts but you may get a fluctuation in connected speed between those suppliers. Not all will give the same speed, due to their general network settings/policy on stability etc.. (your missing 2M).

Thank you for your helpful reply. In practical terms, the only alternative currently available in my neighbourhood is Virgin. I fancy a fibre service, but although BT have enabled my local exchange, they haven't yet enabled my street, and they won't give me even a rough idea of when they will do so, if ever. By the same token, the Sky fibre service isn't available to me either. The trouble with Virgin is that they would want to dig up my front garden and driveway to lay a cable, not to mention endlessly bombard me with marketing offers. So reluctantly I will have to stay with the Sky service I am currently on.

I notice that some Sky users have managed to get themselves put onto fastpath. Could that be a workable option for me? Thanks again.

In reply to a post by Brian49:

Thank you for your helpful reply. In practical terms, the only alternative currently available in my neighbourhood is Virgin. I fancy a fibre service, but although BT have enabled my local exchange, they haven't yet enabled my street, and they won't give me even a rough idea of when they will do so, if ever. By the same token, the Sky fibre service isn't available to me either. The trouble with Virgin is that they would want to dig up my front garden and driveway to lay a cable, not to mention endlessly bombard me with marketing offers. So reluctantly I will have to stay with the Sky service I am currently on.

I notice that some Sky users have managed to get themselves put onto fastpath. Could that be a workable option for me? Thanks again.

Really I doubt if you blind tested you'd notice the difference in speed between 19 and 21.5

Mine synced at 19 initially, and went up to 21 or 22 or whatever it is without me noticing. I only looked the other day when i saw the thread and wondered what my snr was on the speed i was getting.

Of course the speed difference isn't noticeable when opening a web page or or handling mail, but it's certainly noticeable in the time taken to download a large file. But in any case, after several years of having my line being used to its full potential, as it was with O2, it's disappointing to have it now being under-used, not apparently for technical reasons but due to Sky policy. Ah well!

I used to get at least 21.5 meg downstream speed with O2, with no dropouts, with help from SNR adjustments made via my Billion router (this doesn't work with Sky). I have a quiet, stable line, I am less that 3/4 of a mile from the exchange, and I recently had an Openreach engineer check and refurbish all my household wiring and equipment.

The way Be and o2 worked was they set a noise margin of 3db, 6db or 9db etc. Say you had a 6db noise margin set, when you rebooted the router it would sync at a speed that yielded a 6db noise margin.

If you manually adjusted this on your router, so that now the target was 2db, it would sync faster and now with a 2db noise margin. Hence you could do SNR adjustments with your billion router to get better speeds.

This isn't how every ISP operates unfortunately. Like you have seen Sky does not work like this.
What Sky do is they run line management. They usually start you off at 4Mbps. If this is stable they then try a little faster. Eventually you will reach your 18.5Mbps. They may then try 20Mbps, if this has error build up or drops out they will drop you back down to say 18.5Mbps.
Say 18.5Mbps was the fastest speed that didn't have too much error build up, Sky now FIX this speed as the MAXIMUM speed you can ever sync at.
Usually this sync speed coincides with a 3db, 6db, 9db or 12db noise margin. So the most stable lines will get a fast speed set and will get an SNR around 3db.

The point is you can never sync higher than this speed set, not even with router tweaking because it's not a SNR target anymore, it's capped based on the sync speed. That's how their line management works.

This means most sky lines always resync at a very similar sync everytime and speeds don't vary too much.

If you can post up your line statistics we can see if there's room for tweaking.

Thanks for that. Here are my line stats:

Down Up
Rate (kbps) 18642 1159
SNR margin (0.1 dB): 43 50
Attenuation (0.1 dB): 265 148
Output power (0.1 dBm): 231 104
Attainable rate (kbps): 20212 1192

Edited by deleted (Mon 07-Jul-14 18:19:33)

In reply to a post by Brian49:

Of course the speed difference isn't noticeable when opening a web page or or handling mail, but it's certainly noticeable in the time taken to download a large file. But in any case, after several years of having my line being used to its full potential, as it was with O2, it's disappointing to have it now being under-used, not apparently for technical reasons but due to Sky policy. Ah well!

Really? A small % difference in downloading a large file is noticable? A file that takes 60 mins now would have taken what, 55.5 mins?

I'm personally more troubled by losing annex m where I've gone from 2.3 to 1.3. That does make a big difference with large files.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

This means most sky lines always resync at a very similar sync everytime and speeds don't vary too much.

I have usually found my own synch speed cap is set above what I can actually achieve. So in effect, I have the traditional synch speed set by target margin system (currently, 3 dB target, achieving 20 meg synch). I'm happy with this arrangement.

http://s29.postimg.org/t24d6q48n/speed.png

I thought I'd have another go at persuading Sky to do better. After some to-ing and fro-ing with their live chat team, they've put me onto a new profile which gives me these stats:

Down Up
Rate (kbps): 19971 1139
SNR margin (0.1 dB): 14 40
Attenuation (0.1 dB): 265 149
Output power (0.1 dBm): 231 104
Attainable rate (kbps): 22064 1172

which is a very welcome improvement. The downstream SNR margin is lower than I thought Sky would allow, but from my experience the connection should still hold steady, unless of course Sky's DLM policy gets in the way again.

Interesting to know they will now make these small changes. Did you have to push hard for this?

I didn't have to push in order to get them to be helpful, but I did have to push against their conviction regarding the maximum speed my line will stably support. Also, they messed things up at the first attempt, leaving me with a much lower speed, so I had to ask them to try again. I would add that this outcome was arrived at by using the live chat facility; I couldn't get much sense out of the people on the telephone helpline.