Sky Fibre Network drowning, sub-broadband speeds reported

The vast majority of KitGuru readers access the internet through broadband and many of you have the fortune (cash and luck) to be fibred-up-baby. In fact, during our last major survey, more than 40% of you reported accessing KitGuru with fibre. Based on what we're hearing, we will have to hope that you're not with Sky. KitGuru fires up a 56k fax/modem in order to complete the story.

Up until about a month ago, all was sweetness and light with the Sky Fibre Network.

Speeds in excess of 40Mbps were being experienced and everything was good.

Then ‘something' happened and the speeds died, down to something in the 5-7Mbps range. That's the kind of speed you can achieve with TalkTalk and a £2.50 a month contract.

If you're spending in the £20-30 a month that Sky demands, then you expect the 38-76Mbps speeds that are being advertised.

We started to get complaints from readers in the North London area, which could be a small/localised issue, but then we started to get complaints from 20-30 miles away.

That is a completely different set of transmission hardware, indicating a far more widespread issue.

Searching the web and you will find TONS of links for problems with Sky Fibre, including some interesting 7 page discussions like this.

The people complaining are no Muppets and appear to include seriously qualified network engineers.

Here is a neat set of points that you might want to be aware of, if you are a Sky Fibre customer:-

• Initially, Sky support personnel seemed to blow off these issues and said that ‘If people are not happy, they can leave, but they must pay up the remaining year's contract'
• On being told that this was illegal – and complaints being made MUCH further up the Sky food chain, it seems that something called the ‘Sky Executive Committee' have admitted a serious issue exists, that it is not something that can be fixed before December and that if you want to leave tomorrow – that's fine – sorry – they cannot fulfil their contract
• While customers will need to wait until December for a fix, it has been described as a ‘Christmas present‘ – so should these poor Sky customers be expecting compensation?

From what KitGuru understands, the bizarre thing is that the Sky routers report ‘Full Fibre Speeds', but checks with independent tests like Broadband Speed Checker and Speedtest, show speeds in the 4-8Mbps zone – often with upload speeds that are greater than download speeds.

Why would a router from Sky report ‘All good, no problems here, wow your internet is fast!' – while independent tests show a stuttering service that struggles to maintain simple Youtube/music streaming services?
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KitGuru says: We will be in contact with Sky for an explanation and will let you know if they decide to tell their customers what is going on. For now, it seems to be ‘Sky Fibre Falling – Damage Estimates To Follow'.

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