Well at least I am not the only one having speed issues!

[sbohan]

I've been on the phone to sky for about 5 occasions trying to get this sorted or at least escalated past Level 1 but no-one seems to want to listen to me!

I did get through to a very useful guy one day who agreed with me (hence why he was deemed useful ) and he said he would get BT to uncap my line and let it sync itself.

Now I'm not up to scratch with the networking side of things as I would like to be but I do think I have a valid case. I saw a tutorial on here yesterday about trying the test socket which I have done in the past to try and sort the problem, I had no luck at all. In fact the Sync speed was EXACTLY the same without the faceplate.

I have in the past been lucky enough to receive the full 16Mb down speed that Sky advertises at an old address. However after moving into my new apartment I am unable to get over a quarter of this speed when theoretically I should be getting close to full.

Here are my line stats before the guy at sky said he would remove the cap:

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 4224 kbps 768 kbps
Line Attenuation 33 db 8.5 db
Noise Margin 7 db 12 db

Since the Cap they have stayed pretty much static but the down sync is always 4096 kbps no matter what time I force a re-connect.

I really am annoyed at this and would like to get as close to the speed I have paid for as possible, any tips from you guys would go much appreciated and I would try to help out in the community as much as possible with other issues I know about.

Here is what I found when I took the faceplate to pieces, is this right to have only the two wires in use? I have about 5 extensions running from those two wires and would have though something more substantial would be required:

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/117230/cable.jpg

I've read about this CTS group and was wondering if it was possible to contact them directly as I am fed up of playing around with micro filters on tier 1!!

Cheers in advance, Shaun

[PaulSky]

You won't get to the CST group without an open ticket or going through tier 1. When you were in the test socket did you lose the dial tone on all other extensions? Do you suffer any noise or interference on the telephone line as (if all is working well, filtered properly and no issues at exchange) you should be seeing roughly 13Mb I would think on that line if things were working perfectly.

[sbohan]

No Dial tones on any lines, the extensions were through the faceplate. No noise on the lines through the phone as far as I can tell through the broken BT phone I am using. I still have an open ticket I think as I never gave permission for it to be closed, the last contact I had with them was for them to say they had done all they could to increase my speed and were sorry if it wasn't good enough.

Is there any set way to ring T1 to get this bumped up or such?

[Isitme]

You say your connection speed did not change in the Test socket, well if you are capped that is to be expected. What you want to see is a rise in the noise margin. Take your stats from your normal position and then from the Test socket and post both here for comparison. Just copy and paste them, don't use uploaded images.

If that is the main wire into your box then that is quite normal. A single phone only requires 2 wires back to the exchange.

[sbohan]

Originally Posted by Isitme

You say your connection speed did not change in the Test socket, well if you are capped that is to be expected. What you want to see is a rise in the noise margin. Take your stats from your normal position and then from the Test socket and post both here for comparison. Just copy and paste them, don't use uploaded images.

If that is the main wire into your box then that is quite normal. A single phone only requires 2 wires back to the exchange.

Will do that when I get home, be about 50 minutes.

[PaulSky]

Originally Posted by sbohan

I still have an open ticket I think as I never gave permission for it to be closed, the last contact I had with them was for them to say they had done all they could to increase my speed and were sorry if it wasn't good enough.

You don't have to give permission for the ticket to be closed, that is the call of the CST agent at the time.

Is there any set way to ring T1 to get this bumped up or such?

If the ticket is open T1 can put you back to CST again, if it's closed you have to be prepared to troubleshoot for slow speed again. At this point the easiest thing to do is put a new filter onto your test socket, plug the router and phone into that, call T1. If you call tier 1 and are already in the test socket and have changed the filter you will go through the troubleshoot very quickly and will go back to CST within 7 or 8 mins of starting the call. Obviously if CST are busy and queued up you will have to wait in the queue for them.

[Isitme]

You don't have to give permission for the ticket to be closed, that is the call of the CST agent at the time

That is what annoys a lot of Sky users. Some other ISPs, such as Plusnet, do not close tickets, that can only be done by the user when they are satisfied the fault has been fixed. If Sky followed this policy, there would be far fewer complaints.

I know this policy is out of the control of the Sky agents and techs, it needs intervention from higher up the food chain.

[sbohan]

Ok Here are the results taken just now:

Plugged directly into the test socket:

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 4096 kbps 768 kbps
Line Attenuation 31 db 8 db
Noise Margin 22 db 14 db

Plugged directly into the faceplate:
ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 4096 kbps 768 kbps
Line Attenuation 32 db 8.5 db
Noise Margin 17 db 10 db

Plugged into the extension nearest my machine:
ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 4096 kbps 768 kbps
Line Attenuation 33 db 8.5 db
Noise Margin 20 db 9 db

Obviously Margin is adjusting with time, but after leaving them on for all 5 minutes I took the median number for the Margin, Can someone please help .

[Brian69]

You say "since moving into my new apartment" do you know if others are having problems with their broadband.

[sbohan]

Not sure, There are only 20 or so apartments here so I don't think it is a contention issue. It's now 7pm which I would consider to be about peak time, and here are the stats:

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 4096 kbps 768 kbps
Line Attenuation 33 db 8.5 db
Noise Margin 21 db 9 db

I know that there is a guy on the floor above me who gets sync speeds around 6Mb.