Will switching from BT to Sky get a faster broadband?

kkpolobear

Mark_In_Hampshire wrote: »

LLU *is* ADSL.

However LLU connects your line directly (almost) to the provider's kit (e.g. Sky, BE) rather than going through BT Wholesale equipment. So, if you migrate to Sky, you are correct, you will bypass some BT equipment.

BT Wholesale uses profiling which can react to unstable lines by dropping the speed and might prevent you from squeezing the last drop of performance out of one of BT's special knackered old lines.

BE does not.

Additionally LLU suppliers are all (I think....) ADSL2+ which can support faster speeds than ADSL.

However in order to get those, you generally need to have a sync of about 4 Meg anyway. Less than that might bring little or no improvement, and may actually cause instability.

We live 1.5 miles from the exchange, the predicted speed is 2.5Mbps which is the ADSL MAX rate.

The IP Profile is more important - ours was 1750kbps and so speed results - actuals - should indeed be in the range of 1.5Mbps.

I have a suspicion that Sky don't supply caller ID, but I could be wrong on that. Do check.

On your point 4 - I don't know how you have this set up - never had such a service...

On point 5 - downtime should be a matter of minutes while some wires are moved from one place to another. However, you are at the mercy of BT Openreach who do the work, so make sure you have a mobile handy.

i've got sky and indeed caller id is free
also i was on bt and all i got was 8mb and once changed over to sky my speed want up to 20mb so thats a lot of different really

lucylucky

"2. Will I lose my btopenworld email addresses?"

Yes as you will no longer be using bt.

They might stay "live" for some time but I would not rely on them, better off with a web based email perhaps, like gmail, gmx, yahoo, hotmail etc etc

iniltous

kkpolobear wrote: »

i've got sky and indeed caller id is free
also i was on bt and all i got was 8mb and once changed over to sky my speed want up to 20mb so thats a lot of different really

You were probably on a upto 8Mb connection with BT, so thats the max it can offer, with Sky you are on ADSL2+ which is upto 20Mb, BT also offer upto 20Mb broadband in most places, so someone on a similar line length to you would also get 20Mb with BT, same as they would with Sky

Mark_In_Hampshire

kkpolobear wrote: »

i've got sky and indeed caller id is free
also i was on bt and all i got was 8mb and once changed over to sky my speed want up to 20mb so thats a lot of different really

Yes - you're one of the very lucky ones, whose line can actually support the maximum possible speed

So up to 8Meg = 8meg (ADSL)
Up to 20Meg = 20Meg (ADSL2+)

If however the line is one which manages a sync of 2.5Meg with ADSL then it will probably also manage a similar sync with ADSL2+ e..g no improvement, it might atually be slightly worse but then the modem mode can be set back to ADSL to recover the original faster speed.

The short answer to the original question would seem to be: with such slow speeds, there is little or nothing to lose by trying the swap.

ACDeag

Caller Display is free with BT if you ask for the BT Privacy service and make some calls through BT each month.

neil40

If you have your calls through sky though there is no way to make calls on bt using 1280 prefix as sky have blocked this.

Neil

steve1980

swwchris wrote: »

The only thing I could moan about is that you have to use the SKY router, the password is not given to users (although this can be extracted if determined to use a different router).

You mean to get into the router? username = admin password = sky