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.