Hi,

Thanks for the message, do you mean the Sky forum at skyuser.co.uk or another one?

Sky 3rd line called me at lunchtime (as was agreed when the BTO engineer was booked last week). Straight away we heard noise on the line, the error count went stratospheric and my BB dropped mid call. From all the evidence it does seem that there is a copper fault so another BTO engineer visit is booked for tomorrow morning - hopefully this time he will move my connection onto a different copper pair.....

Breath, holding, not.

This is the forum http://helpforum.sky.com/ It's the official sky forum.

Yep, it seems that there are more than a few people with very similar symptoms to mine - overcapacity problems? As I live in a VM cabled area, most of my neighbours are with VM so it might not be a local congestion problem.

If my issue does not turn out to be a cabling fault then I think that my only option will be to leave Sky and go elsewhere - possibly BT or Plusnet (Yes, BT with a different wrapper!).

Watch this space (Gentle reader, I bet you can hardly wait....)

Congestion does not suddenly break a connection, and it would be visible in our speed test if that was the issue (hence why our test http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html) does two download tests and displays the graphs too.

The description of issues when the phone rings and picks up points to a cabling issue and most likely in the exchange if recently moved from one bit of hardware at the exchange to another.

In reply to a post by davidjfirman:

Sky 3rd line called me at lunchtime (as was agreed when the BTO engineer was booked last week). Straight away we heard noise on the line, the error count went stratospheric and my BB dropped mid call. From all the evidence it does seem that there is a copper fault so another BTO engineer visit is booked for tomorrow morning - hopefully this time he will move my connection onto a different copper pair.....

Hopefully your next engineer will be told to look for a voice fault rather than a broadband fault - they're a lot more focused on these. Anything from problematic NTE5 in your home to crimps under covers in the street are needed to be looked at. Good luck.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by davidjfirman:

Sky 3rd line called me at lunchtime (as was agreed when the BTO engineer was booked last week). Straight away we heard noise on the line, the error count went stratospheric and my BB dropped mid call. From all the evidence it does seem that there is a copper fault so another BTO engineer visit is booked for tomorrow morning - hopefully this time he will move my connection onto a different copper pair.....

Hopefully your next engineer will be told to look for a voice fault rather than a broadband fault - they're a lot more focused on these. Anything from problematic NTE5 in your home to crimps under covers in the street are needed to be looked at. Good luck.

Oh dear.......

Engineer came, found a copper fault between two junction boxes (voltage bleed to another conductor) so moved the circuit from one pair to another. PQ test passed (hurrah!)

10 minutes later, both upstream and downstream fell over, then again, and again...... AAAARRRRGGHHHH!!!!!!

So, it seems like the new pair is worse than the old - evidenced by the upstream SNR falling from 7.7 to 4.4 dB.

It looks like BTO will be coming back and laying new cable!

Many interesting posts re: BE/o2 to Sky.
I commented here months ago about similar issues i.e. bizarre financial complications regarding the move. Emails, texts and letters confused the issue even more. Some posters on here insisted that my problem was unique, no one else has these problems - it must be you!
Gratifying, in a perverse way, that so many people have since experienced similar problems to my sister: no comment from the deniers, lately.
I was castigated for daring to suggest that direct debits, to o2, should be cancelled and a new one set up with Sky. Had I not cancelled the DD for her, she'd still be arguing with o2/Sky about charges and devious offerings from Sky.
If there ARE issues, I'd suggest cancelling DDs - this will prompt them to get their collective fingers out.

This sounds very similar to a fault a friend of mine had and he jumped through the same hoops as you have only to find that another device in his house was causing interference with the Sky hub. So might be worth checking if the problem started around the time you may have plugged in a new bit of kit.

Most of these are different to your sister's issues.

You only talk about broadband issues. How is the phone line? Quiet Line Test, etc.