Hi @NeilO, we are currently with Sky fibre on exchange EMCHELL (Cabinet 16 I think). We have been experiencing very bad evening congestion since probably September last year, with download speeds dropping to <5Mbps every evening between about 1930 and 1030, and often around 1-2 Mbps. We now often struggle to stream HD and I watch images downloading on web pages.
According to Sky's diagnostic tools that I run most nights at the worst speed time, there is no problem with my line and is according to them downloading at 42Mbps. I assume their test is just looking at the line sync speed and not actually doing any live download test. At off-peak hours we get pretty stable 38 download / 9 upload / 16ms latency so I am pretty sure there is no problem with our line as such. I've had my computer attached via ethernet cable for a while now to avoid the standard "it's your wi-fi" response I seem to get on the Sky community forum every time I ask a question.
I've now started recording the speeds using the thinkbroadband speed test for evidence as I'm totally fed up with this and want to exit the contract early if they can't fix this soon (see pic - shows single thread download and latency, the x-axis is time). Because their line test finds no fault, its impossible to get through the Sky tech support automated phone system to speak to someone, because it knows the auto line test found no fault, and they are prioritising support due to COVID. The suggestion it gives before ending the call is that you go on their community forum, which I've had no success through.
I finally managed to speak to a real person at Sky tech support last week after spending 3 hours on the phone randomly not responding to diffferent automated questions to see if I could find a sequence that would get me through to a real person. Somehow I managed to do that and spoke to someone who was quite helpful, and after following the same troubleshooting steps that I've done myself countless times I've managed to get an engineer booked to investigate. But from following other threads on the Sky forums what seems to happen is that engineers repeatedly visit at non-peak hours and report no problems, and then the thread ends with I assume the person giving up and moving to another ISP.
Conversely I've read a number of similar threads ending in positive outcomes on this forum, with seemingly helpful and very technically knowledgeable responses from yourself and others. So I'm thinking of moving back to BT.
I've seen on some of the other threads the mods have mentioned looking at "congestion reports" for exchanges to see if there are known issues and planned dates for upgrades. Is there anything logged for my exchange? The Sky tech support didn't know what I meant when I asked about this. I am unsure whether this issue is a Sky specific issue or generally at this exchange. Is there any issue you can see from your data that indicates this issue won't improve if I switch to BT fibre ?
I'd be immensely grateful for any help you can give me on this.
Thanks, Pete.
Hi @badbunny Congestion is normally on the DSLAM so checking the exchange will not help. I normally look at the specific DSLAM the line is connected to in order to see if it is over capacity and I can only do this for BT broadband customers, sorry.
Hi @badbunny I'm afraid I can't say that moving ISP will resolve these issues as I'm not familiar with your ISP's network. The DSLAM's BT use are provided by Openreach however each ISP may have diferent backhaul network settings.
