Sky On Demand download speed.

Hi, I recently went from ADSL2+ with around 8Mbps down to Infinity 1 with 51 Mbps down and in my ignorance I thought great, once I get fibre the downloads on Sky On Demand would be proportionately quicker, a lot quicker...but I don't actually think they are coming in any quicker. I expected it to be lightning but alas not. I'm doing it exactly the same way, wirelessly via a Sky On Demand Connector, I have an older 2TB Sky+ HD box where it isn't built in, our router is near the front door so I've never had it via an Ethernet connection. Signal strength is fine at around 85%.
I just expected things to be quicker, maybe 7x quicker...was I wrong to think it should come down quicker with fibre?
Is this Sky being sneaky in that my fibre package is with BT and not them and somehow they slow you down? As far as I know a customer has no way to alter bandwidth allocation with Sky downloads to make it go quicker...so is this how it is going to be? To say I was disappointed would be something of an understatement!
Dave

Time to get a temporary cable from router to Sky box and see if that makes a difference, if it does then proves the likely scenario that the wireless connection may be the limitation.

Not sure but maybe Sky rate limit the downloads - maybe they don't allow it much faster than a streaming service would require? I've never really looked to see what bandwidth the downloads are actually taking up.

Yes thanks Andrew, I may well end up trying that. It'll be interesting to see if anybody else replies who was in the same situation as me but they got an immediate quicker download rate still doing it wirelessly.

Ian, maybe I was making the wrong assumption that an increase in my broadband speed would automatically see an increase in the speed to bring down episodes of whatever from Sky, possibly they do limit it for whatever reason. I haven't contacted Sky about it, but a quick Google search the other day other people have asked about the same thing.

In some ways it makes sense to rate limit it for the Sky download service. Most people will open the programme, maybe fast forward a little passed any adverts but then watch it in "real time". As long as the download is faster than the real time viewing then it is fast enough. Installing bandwidth so that thousands of users can download at line speed would be an expensive extravagance for what is only slightly more than a streaming service.

Sky do rate limit downloads (and from memory it maxed out somewhere in the region of 10 - 15Mbps from calcs I did back when I still had Sky). It's worth remembering that Sky use 'Progressive Download' so outright speed isn't that important as you can normally start watching fairly quickly while it continues to d/l in the background..

The issue also probably isn't helped by the Sky Connector/Booster in the OPs case

Edited by Davey_H (Thu 27-Apr-17 17:28:26)

Thanks guys.
Dave

Sky+HD boxes can download at a maximum of 18Mb/s.

Sky Q boxes can reach over 90Mb/s if using Ethernet (the port is 10/100).

Thanks cje85, interesting to know.

Sorry for the bump but I came here from Google.

Over ethernet I can download at 40Mb on Sky+ HD, Wi-Fi is capped to around 20Mb.

Are you asking a question or answering something that was raised over 3 years ago?