Sky Speed Issues

Some general advice required, from those more knowledgable than myself, before I vent direct to Sky.

I have had Sky max for some time now, late last year rings a bell, and up till now, things haven't been too bad. With an attenuation of 44dB Sky refused to connect me via ADSL2+ in order to maintain a stable connection. This connection was just over the 6Mb mark. All seemed well, until about 2 months ago, where every evening I had to reboot the router, as the noise margin had dropped into the 5's and nothing would work. Fair enough I thought, it is the evening.

However I have had to continually reboot the router over the last few weeks, on average every other evening, and the connection speed always drops to get back to a sensible noise margin. Now my connection is under the 5Mb mark, and so I have lost over 1Mb of connection speed, and I am not happy about it.

So before I go to Sky and ask them why, my attenuation is still 44dB, any suggestions from the kowledge base on here. If I continue like this, I'll end up with no connection at all. I thought for 44dB I should be in excess of 6Mb anyway, but Sky says not, in fact Sky says don't believe the speed checkers, personally, I don't believe Sky.

Thanks for any help in advance.

Bloater

Have you got new filters you can try? Have you tried keeping it plugged in to the master socket for the evening to see if the problem still occurs? Make sure it's not something under your control before getting on to sky.

Could be that there is a problem developing with the phone line. But it would probably be difficult to get BT out to fix it with the speeds you are still getting. Only hope of getting this sort of problem fixed by BT is if you also had noise on the voice side (then BT are on firmer ground and would fix), if voice is fine then unlikely to get far with the ADSL unless it gets much worse.

Rebooting the router anytime atempts a target snr margin of 7db on the supplied netgear router in theory it needs this mimimum snr margin to operate properly.

IF you are getting snr margin of 7db or very close in the evening and that gives you 5mb downstream sync speed that is all your line will perform at in its curent state, this can be for many reasons connected to noise in one form or another on the line or induced from close to it, this in its self is not sky bb fault. It may not even be directly BTs fault.

The first thing to do is to do all you can in the evening to increase your noise margin to locate an issue and there are many discussed in many threads ie ext cabling, filters, electric appliences, ring wire the list goes on.

For ref my BB on Sky Max is 8.7 meg daytime ADSL2+ 7db snr margin down and 47db Att.

On nights its about 8 meg same stats after a reboot swapping off adsl2+ gives (g.dmt -what your on) 7616k sync down all the time.

So to sum up lines vary, time of day, time of year, mine was 10mb all the time, you need to check the points I have made re noise at your end before you complain to sky about a enviromental or fault issue that will be beyond there direct control, though they maybe able to raise a fault with BT ?

Thanks for that Chaps.

If only Sky would be consistent in their approach to customers. My attenuation is 44dB, and they have flatly refused to give me ADSL2+. They have stated, more than once, that giving me ADSL2+ would cause service issues and disconnections. To that end they tweaked my connection(apparently) to give best possible speed on normal ADSL. This was 6.1 Mb up until a few weeks ago. I have been used to rebooting in the evenings to maintain a noise margin, but only every few weeks, now its every day or two.

Early on rebooting would get the noise margin back to 7.6, but maintain the connection speed at 6.1 Mb. Now when the servise dies in the evening, noise margin in the 5's a reboot gets the noise margin back to 7.6, but takes around 0.2Mb off the connection speed. But this 0.2Mb reduction happens every time, so something has changed somewhere, possibly in the ground on my line. I will check the filters later when I get home, as I have my pre-Sky filters I could use.

I will report back if anything changes, just at the moment, I am disgruntled to be losing my connection speed everytime I reboot.

Cheers.

Batfink

I have done some of the checks, ring wire is removed, master socket only used

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Rebooting the router anytime atempts a target snr margin of 7db on the supplied netgear router in theory it needs this mimimum snr margin to operate properly.

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No, I think that's set to allow for the day/night variation in noise. I joined Sky last week, and immediately junked the Netgear router, which got far too hot compared to the Speedtouch 546 that I used with Zen. Using the DMT tool I tweaked the target SNR on the Speedtouch down to 5dB, and even when the margin falls to 2dB the router is still quite happy. My line has held a sync speed of 6464kbps for more than 4 days now, which is excellent, considering that I only used to get a sync speed of 4416kbps with Zen.

"No, I think that's set to allow for the day/night variation in noise"

which would mean its able to operate properly - which is what I said!

I dident think it nessasery to spell out all the implications of operating properly with regards to obvious variations in normal snr margin fluctuations.

I also run two other routers and they react diferently on the same line which is why I qualified it as the supplied netgear!



Geez what is it with the constant nitpicking on these forums.

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... I dident think it nessasery to spell out all the implications .....

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Oh, the irony !