Sky offers up to 5 million people a FREE solution for poor Wi-Fi speeds

As you would expect from a site like KitGuru, the vast majority of our readers are connecting at regular and fibre optic broadband speeds. In our most recent survey, only 3% of you are using a non-broadband connection. But what happens when that connection hits the router and you're reliant on wireless in the home/office?   Well for many Sky customers, this has been a disaster recently. KitGuru follows up on how the company has put its hands in the air and offered an intelligent solution.

To say that KitGuru has been following Sky's attempts to connect the UK closely, might be a bit of an understatement.

When they claimed to be well on their way to providing a huge increase in broadband capability after some key takeovers, we were there.

When the Sky network groaned under the pressure in November, we reported it.

And we were there when it finally came to light that plenty of work needed to be done in the background and that there was no ‘quick fix' available.

Formally saying that Sky Broadband seemed to have been ‘upgraded' to Sky Brokeband might have appeared harsh, but that's because a lot of the customers who were suffering, were actually experiencing a different – more chronic problem.

The range of Sky's actual wireless routers seems to be very suspect.

How suspect?

Well enough that Sky has had to open its substantial coffers to 5 million customers with an offer of a FREE WIRELESS BOOSTER up until the end of January. The picture below says it all – and we have made it ‘clickable' so you can get to the right place on their site nice and easy.

So just how bad is this problem?

Well KitGuru was fortunate enough to be invited into 2 homes where the problem exists. Both have Sky Fibre, which claims 38Mbps connection speeds.

In both cases, we hardwired a laptop to the back of the router and did a speed test with Ookla. In both cases, we were getting speeds of around 36Mbps – which shows that the Sky technology outside of the house is running fine.

We then switched the laptop to wireless mode and moved away from the box to see what happened with the signal. To simulate a real world experrience, we kept close to ‘line of site' with the router and moved to around 5 metres away. The ‘Just in another room' kind of scenario that a decent router should find no issue at all.

In the first household, we compared what was happening on the laptop – against what we could get with an iPad using a T-Mobile SIM card on 3G. Where the iPad was getting over 10Mbps from T-Mobile, the laptop was struggling for 7Mbps from the Sky router.

In the second household, things got a little worse. While the laptop could barely manage 5Mbps to the router, we used a smartphone with a Vodafone 4G SIM to achieve 24Mbps.

To make matters worse, we then enabled a local networking option on the phone and allowed the laptop to connect to the web via 4G – which also resulted in speeds around the 20Mbps mark.

To summarise, without this FREE wireless booster from Sky, you could be suffering a horrendously slow connection with the existing Sky Broadband Router – a connection that is 1/4 the speed of a 4G phone connection – even when tested using the same laptop etc.

If you're one of the 5 million Sky Broadband customers that BSkyB claims to have, then we suggest you get ordering before the end of January 2014.

We applaud Sky for taking this position and making sure that a FREE solution is available to its customers.

.KitGuru says: If you have Sky Broadband – then order ASAP. It's free and could save you years of grief/slow connections. That's out advice. Sky is doing the right thing and must be applauded.

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