Sky Broadband Changes - 22nd June

[dholdi]

Post your stats, that will show if you have the best you can achieve.

[bl!p]

Hi, first post and all, be gentle

Got my letter today and extremely annoyed about the changes to Mid/Everday This news had completely passed me by.

Where I live, reasonably newly built estate (think 91), the council refused the request to put in an extra exchange at the time so connected to one too far up the road and whilst I get and improved speed compared to my previous ISP (plus.net), it's still only 350k/sec.

My guess is that moving to Everyday is not going to see any improvement in speed, so all I'm left with is the cut in my cap. I could go to Unlimited but is there much point, I'll see no speed increase, but can download (slowly) to my heart's content.

Whoop-de-do . . .

[orbiter]

Originally Posted by dholdi

Post your stats, that will show if you have the best you can achieve.

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 10531 kbps 765 kbps
Line Attenuation 39.5 db 20.4 db
Noise Margin 6.1 db 11.0 db

Please advise on stats? Sky man (tech support) said 13Mb was not stable enough.

[Mr Spouse]

Originally Posted by youravinalarrrf

If the poll results in so far on the thread below are anything like representative Sky have MASSIVELY underestimated their customers strength of feeling on this issue!

Mid users, who's leaving because of the new limit

35% of Mid customers already in the process of leaving or already left.
50% of Mid customers waiting see what happens after 1st Aug then deciding. (just what they expect to see that's any different I don't know?)
15% of Mid customers definitely staying (probably only because they have no suitable alternative available in their exchange.)

Even a conservative estimate would suggest that Sky are going to lose at least 50% of all Mid customers?

As someone famously said, there are lies, damned lies and statistics...

Your poll has a MASSIVE (your emphasis, mate) 102 responses. I hate to point this out but 41 out of 102 is (a) not 50% and (b) statistically not relevant with a sample size that small.

Just out of interest, does anyone know how many Mid subscribers there are?

[dholdi]

@ orbiter, yes - he/she was probably right.
Line attenuation of 40 would give around 12mb so pushing it to 13 would be unstable.
Its better to have a stable 10 mb connection than an unstable 13mb one.
The throughput ( consistent data, rather than inconsistent data that needs to be retransmitted ) that you will get from 10 will give better results than if you were connnected at 13.
Hope that makes sense.

[orbiter]

Originally Posted by dholdi

@ orbiter, yes - he/she was probably right.
Line attenuation of 40 would give around 12mb so pushing it to 13 would be unstable.
Its better to have a stable 10 mb connection than an unstable 13mb one.
The throughput ( consistent data, rather than inconsistent data that needs to be retransmitted ) that you will get from 10 will give better results than if you were connnected at 13.
Hope that makes sense.

Yea perfect sense thanks dholdi. The router actually re-synced @ 10.5Mbps after a reboot (not long after Sky finished adjustments) So I think this is probably the best for stabilty. When at 11.5Mbps it actually felt quite unstable through the way web pages where being displayed, certain things would take longer than usual, as if data was dropping and being resent because of errors. I am quite satisfied with 10Mbps or above and the doubled upload speeds certainly help especially when updating my website etc.

Thanks for the help & advise mate

[apwestgarth]

I'm seriously considering moving from Sky, been reasonably happy with the service, however the changes to the download limit really could cause me issues. I regularly test software and hardware, I'm also a MS MVP so have an online subscription to MSDN which means I download ISOs quite regularly and in one month I can easily download more than 10GB just in ISOs.

Before Sky I was with madasafish and they allowed customers to see usage figures, a major plus point.

I've had a look at my router stats (great tool btw!!), and my connection speed is great (I am only 1.1KM from the exchange tho), but my major concern is the download cap.

Sagem F@ST 2504 [Sky Firmware]

ADSL LinkDownstreamUpstream
Connection Speed8185 kbps412 kbps
Line Attenuation37.0 db18.9 db
Noise Margin10.8 db24.5 db

[Mr Spouse]

Originally Posted by apwestgarth

I regularly test software and hardware, I'm also a MS MVP so have an online subscription to MSDN which means I download ISOs quite regularly and in one month I can easily download more than 10GB just in ISOs.

Sounds to me like you are exactly the type of person that Sky would definitely NOT want on their Mid package!

I hope you aren't running a business through your Sky connection. You have read the T&Cs...?

[apwestgarth]

Originally Posted by Mr Spouse

Sounds to me like you are exactly the type of person that Sky would definitely NOT want on their Mid package!

I hope you aren't running a business through your Sky connection. You have read the T&Cs...?

No I'm not running a business through my Sky Connection. I would never run services on a home user broadband service - not enough resiliency. I work full time for an engineering firm. I am however active in the UK IT Community and speak at usergroups and conferences. Sorry but from your reply are you indicating that Sky is only interested in recreational users who only use iPlayer etc?

I test software and develop software as a hobby. I have never gone over my 40GB limit, and I dare say I am not using on average 20GB but to have my limit reduced to a quarter of the plan I signed up to is very harsh and unacceptable. I would imagine there are also other users out there who will be running bittorrent etc and "sharing" a lot more data than I download legitimately.

[CyberDrac]

Downstream Line Attenuation - 21.0 db
Upstream Line Attenuation - 12.5 db
Downstream Noise Margin - 16.4 db
Upstream Noise Margin - 14.0 db

Contrary to my earlier post where I considered that I wouldn't get any speed advantage in moving to the unlimited package I went back and looked at the figures for my router (listed above) and put them into one of the many ADSL speed calculators on the web (::. Kitz - Max speed calculator .::) and ended up with a figure for "adsl2+ (LLU)" which is what I believe that we are talking about of "19872kbps" which seems like an acceptable increase from my 6880kbps.

The reason why I check was that I remembered that I had originally got the full 8mbps from my connection until I had asked for my "max levels" to be adjusted for gaming purposes, which resulted in the speed drop but improved pings. However on a side note I'm still mildly hacked off that my friends on VirginMedia manage to get pings of around 5 to 10 on servers which on a previous ADSL service on the same line I matched, but I now have to put up with 25-35 (dropped from over 60 before max levels being changed).

It is a real shame that I may have to trial unlimited for the next month to see if (before the 1st of August) I will want to stay with them. That date is ridiculous, barely enough enough time to change and have DLM settle down.

In my opinion the date should be moved by at least a month to give their paying customers a chance to see if they will benefit.

edit : an real world example of why I'm upset about the lowered limit which follows on from my earlier post about Steam Game Downloads ... America's Army 3.0 has just decided that it needs to update itself, and trigger a 1.6Gb download, not unusual in this day and age, but it would only take a few of those a month to mess up your download figures.