Sky Fibre - help before I break the contract

Hi everyone,

I moved into a new property and signed up for Sky Fibre, the highest available package at my postcode. Ever since activation, the latency and speed has been very poor in the evenings - almost feels like I'm being throttled, which I'm not.

The connection becomes very unstable roughly around 6:30pm to midnight-2am or so. My jitter goes up from 0ms to 10-15ms, my ping goes up from 30-40ms to 300+ms (as we speak my ping to sky's website and google is north of 300ms). My speed slightly drops.

I had an openreach engineer come out as my speeds initially have not been above the minimum guarantee. He changes the wiring, found double filtering - made an extension from an already extended master socket and left. He did his tests and claimed it was fixed.

Sky hub stats show 52428kbps as my line rate downstream. That's just above the minimum guarantee. Speedtests are much lower than that.

Issue still there, evenings I can't play games. Morning time comes, I get 20-25ms or something much more acceptable.

Openreach guy is coming back on Friday. What do you suggest?

Edited by deleted (Tue 10-Sep-19 22:10:23)

Openreach guy is coming back on Friday. What do you suggest?

Might be worth asking for them to check the stats/error count etc where the router is currently connected, then try again on the end of the incoming pair .... on the UG feed, or the end of the dropwire for instance.

If there�s a fair difference, then this might indicate the cause.

If not, then could the D side be swapped out ?

Though if it is just peak time evening periods affected unlikely to be the line itself and more likely to be congestion on the ISP side of things

He came and didn't figure out anything. Tests ran fine and error count is ok.

They looked at some tool that measures the line daily and said there was a couple of days that were bad but nothing major.

He said the cabinet is massively congested as a lot of people use a single one here. I was lucky to have it right outside my house though. He reckons changing providers won't help.

Does that sound right?

While it is possible for a cabinet to be congested it is very rare to show to this extent, more often its congestion where the data from all the users of a single ISP join up that is the issue.

Talk to neighbours, if they don't have the issue and are on the same FTTC/VDSL2 cabinet and with a different ISP it suggests an ISP switch could well help.

My connection was fine when I started but in the past few months I have had drop out problems and thousands of dropped packets. The last count when I eventually decided to talk with Sky was 555k +

Long story short, they thought there might be a problem with the router until he checked more and saw all the devices on my system. Amazon dots, wireless lighting, phones, computers etc etc....upwards of 18 devices sometimes, I run a gigabit switch for all the stuff I can used wired instead of wireless where I can.

He immediately pointed out I had too much connected. I had already disconnected most and tested again with no change in my problem.

Thanks I said hung up. I disconnected the sky router and connected my Netgear 7000 which had been in the cupboard since my move to sky 6 months ago.

Hey presto, immediately I could see a big jump in speed during tests and then after days of uptime ZERO dropped packets. Issue fixed by dumping sky�s [censored] router.

Give it a try you might just have the answer.

John