Sky Phase 1 Firmware upgrade confirmed!!!!

[Kitch9]

One (primary) reason for this upgrade is that, for some people, the original Sky router 'dies'/locks-up when Noise Margin dB drops and it cannot recover except through a reset or power cycle.
Given this failure mode (and I believe is acknowledged by Sky as a known problem?), it is unreasonable to expect these particular customers to maintain a 24hr connection in the hope that a firmware download will be successful.
To be frank, of all the ways one might choose to fix such a problem, doing it by downloading it - via the very connection that keeps failing! - must rank as downright STUPID. This method invites failure because of the very nature of the problem, most likely before the download can occur, or worse still, during the actual download process itself.

The only practical solution for those Sky customers with this particular problem is to provide the necessary firmware update via a Sky web page, or on a CD, in any case requestable only by known Sky customers via a Sky web page, so that it can be performed locally, and therefore not dependent upon an unreliable internet connection. This is the only way to ensure the update is truly 'available' to these particular Sky customers.

As far as I am concerned, until Sky choose to provide this alternative update option then regardless of any condition in their 'contract', I believe that it is 'reasonable' to provide one's own router to support the Internet Service that one has paid for, on the basis that the router they have provided is faulty (i.e. has faulty firmware) and no reasonable method has been provided to enable correction of the fault.

To illustrate this, when I swapped in the old Sky router today it locked up after just 1 hour of use. I had to cycle its power to restore the internet connection. I believe it locked up due to the noise margin dropping from 7.0db to 5.6db, as is usual around 8:30pm here. By contrast, my own router (Netgear DG834N) has NEVER dropped out in this way, like 5 months without a single drop-out is typical (and it was a power cut that stopped it after 5 months).

Come on Sky. If you REALLY give a blind **** about this, you have GOT to provide a good workable solution for ALL customers, including those like me who suffer with this particular fault.
And while we're at it, it would also help your cause greatly if you actually bothered to TALK to any of us when you intend to do anything like this! No, not just through SkyUser forums - I mean directly. Is that really asking too much???
And save the trees - an email in our Sky email accounts would be wonderful. And dont forget to include a link to the webpage with the firmware update!

Tonytronic.

Turn off UPNP in the routers settings as that causes the lock-ups you describe. It has the benefit of making your network more secure too.

Use port-forwarding if needed. I'm a little concerned about this FW update as my router is rock solid after turning off UPNP.

[NewsreadeR]

LOL

This has become our most viewed thread ever, in this section of the website, in only a couple of weeks. 29,054 views so far.

Some news just in

http://www.skyuser.co.uk/forum/sky-n...top-press.html

[Sc00by22]

My firmware got upgraded about 5 minutes ago! Woo!

[Kidd]

Just been updated. Noticed my attenuation has dropped from 37 to 36, It's always been 37!!

[penrhyn]

Interesting my sync rate has increased from 8190 to 8191, no other changes, noise margin in down a bit at 9.2db but its been like that for a few days.

[geena]

hi guys,

i've spent the last couple of weeks browsing through the information on this site... its been very helpful in understanding whats going on with my connection.

ever since i got connected a few months ago, ive been experiencing frequent disconnects where i would suddenly lose the IP and get error 300, LCP down type errors. sometimes a reboot would solve the problem immediately, other times i would get back on for a few seconds only to be disconnected again.

then i read about the noise margins and started monitoring what was going on there. i found out that most of the time my NM is ok (>7) but occassionally it would dip much lower. hoping that that was the cause i then started using the mognuts utility a couple of days ago, and set my NM much higher. It seemed to help but unfortunately, i cant be sure if it solved the problem or not because my disconnects are quite irregular, sometimes it happens multiple times a day, sometimes not for a week. Today I woke up to find that the mognuts utility was not working for me anymore, which led me to this thread, where i found that i had been upgraded to the new firmware.

i would have been happy about that, except that ive already had multiple drops today, and monitoring my noise margin i was amazed to find that its now worse than its ever been, and seems to be mostly around the 0.x range or even -1 to -2dB range! rebooting the router only seems to resync it temporarily, so generally im even worse off than before, which i hadnt thought possible.

has anyone had similiar problems, or even better any suggestions? i would really appreciate it, im getting seriously fed up with this connection.

thanks!

geena

[richone54]

you may want to have a look in the cabling and faceplate forum for tips on how to improve your internal wiring, the best way to check if it is your internal wirirng would be to do a set of comparison stats from the test socket (see first link in my sig)

post some stats from your set up now and then from the test socket

[Undecided Adrian]

I always found that reboting the router when the noise was at it's worse, from 10pm to midnight meant you got a synch speed that should give a good noise margin all the time.

Using that method I have kept my router up for weeks on end, unfortunately I have sacrificed about 2-3 meg/sec to get the stability but I'd rather be stable than fast with constant reboots.

[geena]

hi,

thanks for the replies. ive actually already been using the test socket throughout all of these tests (i think ive tried almots everything i could find in the forums) so internal wiring is probably not the issue. ive also tried rebooting many times whenever i see the noise margin dropping but that doesnt seem to last either.

but the main reason im asking about it now in this thread is i seem to be getting even worse performance after the firmware upgrade... its the first time ive seen a negative dB noise margin. unfortunately since mognuts doesnt work anymore im not able to get any detailed stats for you guys, except for the following:

Connection Speed 15323 kbps 764 kbps
Line Attenuation 25.5 db 14.9 db
Noise Margin 5.5 db 10.0 db

when i was using mognuts i had the noise margin steady at 10-12 db and my connection speed was lower. now my noise margin is low, and fluctuates a lot, often going down to 0 or below.

thanks!

geena

[Topkidben]

Is there a way of setting a default DNS server for the router so i can make the router use OpenDNS server instead of Sky's? I am using the new Firmware BTW.