You keep replying to yourself when you could just edit a previous post.

Just as an aside, if you know all this technical stuff, why did you go with Sky?

Yes I know - apologies!

Short answer - cost - I got a very good deal off Sky in relation to the price of the product, and I didn't do enough research on the actual product - my bad! Plus, wasn't really expecting the contention issues that I have experienced.

The benefit of the cost is that worst comes to worst, I may just pay up my contract and move on.

My professional experience is more on enterprise and carrier grade circuits - as such, whilst the actual deployments are the same or broadly similar, the last mile of domestic grade VDSL (for example) isn't really my day job. I'm more involved in MPLS type of deployments using various technologies.

Edited by deleted (Wed 15-Jan-14 12:58:06)

In reply to a post by MrShed:

A third reason is by the way (sorry, completely forgot about this), bandwidth demands tend to change much more quickly than bandwidth capacity can be changed.

Which is a very good point - however I won't be a Plusnet customer as I don't mind *all* traffic being slowed down in an area, due to network management, but I dislike the idea that customer A's traffic (because it happens to be Skype, or iPlayer) is more valuable to the ISP than customer B's traffic (because its an Apple iOS download), when we pay the SAME money for the SAME product. (If customer B was discounted for being an inferior service, then that may appeal to some).

I suspect this is where Oliver is coming from, as we were both on O2/BE which didn't do the Plusnet type traffic management either.

Edited by jchamier (Wed 15-Jan-14 19:18:55)

Some good news...

Sky are no longer providing me service on the line which I was facing this issue on. Plusnet are now providing service. There was no peak time congestion last night and the speeds are hugely improved in general too.

So, I'm happy to see that my theory was right in that the congestion was not from the PCP to exchange but was further into the Sky network.

Thanks for this sean. Having a battle with Sky currently to try and get them to release me - want to move to Zen!

I wish you luck

I'm not sure how Sky are going to proceed, having told me twice that I can't leave them and to contact them in 12 months instead - they're no longer providing the service as I left them anyway. I'll wait a little while to get lots of pretty graphs on Plusnet, then send them a big complaint demonstrating how their service was not fit for purpose and the solution was to leave them!

Hi Sean,

For your information...Sky have confirmed that they will release me from my contract!!

Two things:
1) Sky confirmed in writing to me that they were not providing the service that they had contracted to, and as such would release me from my contract. If you are still having issues with regards this, I have no problem in providing you with some information re: who I have been speaking to etc.
2) I'm desperately trying to decide who to use moving forward - what have your experiences of Plusnet been? Specifically asking you as you are on the same exchange!

Great news! Thank you.

I've not yet drafted my many page letter of complaint to them - Shall get that done in the near future. I'm currently waiting to see what their next move is, while getting graphs of how much better service is since leaving - that way I can show them a nice comparison.

Plusnet have been very good indeed. There was a minor screwup, which I kind of expected.

It was a fibre to fibre migration. It seems to be the case that on these the engineers don't bother turning up to the property. The issue I had is that Sky was a self install with an all in one router/modem. Plusnet required a Openreach modem. One was not supplied as the engineer didn't bother to turn up! I work in the industry and like to think I know my stuff in this area, so, I took my own Openreach modem ready for the activation day. Everything worked fine with that.

Having contacted Plusnet regarding the engineer failing to turn up - they've credited the account with the invoice I sent them for the cost of my own installation and providing the relevant hardware etc.

I'll PM you with some further info too...

Thats interesting - my Sky install was a seperate install, with an Openreach engineer!

Was there much downtime during the migration process for you?

Most importantly - how are the speeds/reliability since the move

The 'self install' is a pretty recent method of getting new Sky Fibre customers online.

The fact you have a modem already should assist with a smooth change over.

There wasn't any major downtime. The engineer was meant to turn up between 1pm and 6pm. I turned up myself at 12:40 and checked the line, it had already moved from Sky LLU to BTw, checking in the Sky modem showed the line speed had changed from 40/10 to 80/20 - so, I knew then the service had moved over. I didn't actually hook up the modem until a few hours later.

Speeds have been perfect, full line speeds. There's been 2 drops in the service, during the early hours. Line training I suspect.