Is Sky in breach of contract?

unnameduser

Switched to sky broadband on an offer that MSE had negotiated, a few weeks back, speed is poor, we were getting around 30 Mbps with plusnet and sky gave a minimum of 28 Mbps prior to switch but we are only getting around 22 Mbps and their support is useless, if you can ever manage to get through to them, after countless hours waiting for them to answer and a BT/openreach visit the last thing I got from one of their support people was "I'm not sure where we can go from here in all honesty. " and it seems no one is prepared to enter into much discussion now.

Does this speed mean they are in breach of our contract.

From some of the things the BT guy said I suspect the modem router they insist you use is possibly the problem but never get any direct response to questions about that, it also has no gigabit LAN no 5Ghz or ac wifi and they will not give out settings information required to use a different modem/router.

System

Run the BT Broadband Availability Checker for your phone number. It will show a range of values for your line. If your line is below The Downstream Handback Threshold then speak to Sky.

There are a number of reasons why actual speeds fall. The main reason is interference from adjacent phone lines. My local PCP was changed about 3 months ago. The old box was just a mess of wires. The new PCP has all the wires neatly bundled together. The result is a fall in downstream speed of 10Mbps but my line is still above the Handback Threshold.

You also have these rights under Sky’s tsk and cos:

If after your Sky Broadband is activated, you continue to receive a line speed which is significantly below the speed estimate we gave you when you placed your order (which will be confirmed in the welcome letter we send you) and you have taken the steps we recommend and we are unable to resolve any technical issues you may be having on your line you may select an alternative lower speed Product (if one is available to you) or end this Contract under Condition 11(c). If you select an alternative lower speed Product, we may charge you the difference between what you paid to activate your current Product and the amount you would have paid to activate the lower speed Product if you had signed up to it in the first place.

Note the clever wording: ‘ significantly below’ and ‘have taken steps’.

unnameduser

Thanks for all that Hengus. Not sure what the stuff in your first paragraph is but did various checks for sky support and they always came back low and they kept telling me the tests they did from their end were slow, fortunately I had saved some of the logs from the plusnet hub so had something to compare.

Will have to try to find out what sky consider 'significantly below'. Might try some snail-mail to sky as I'm not getting anywhere with the other contact options.
I wondered if them locking people in to using their out-dated equipment could come under some sort of 'restrictive practises' heading.

kwikbreaks

I'm guessing you were using the Openreach modem when you were with Plusnet and now have a combined modem/router, Certainly not all modems are equal and I'd agree that the most likely reason for the lower speed is the Sky equipment which means there will be no Openreach fix,

I doubt that you'll get out of your contract penalty free. You could use your own access point to overcome the WiFi shortcomings but if you can't find the required userid /password you won't be able to revert to your old Openreach modem (or Plusnet router if you had their combined one) which, imo, would in time see you speeds return,

I had a quick search and found - http://www.skyuser.co.uk/forum/extracting-sky-router-passwords/59028-simple-tool-extracting-username-password-your-router.html

where it says..

DEC 2016 - It is no longer a requirement to extract your username and password, at least for fibre connections. For several months now as long as there is an option61 string sent then anything will work
e.g.
abcdefgh@skydsl
1234567890abcdef will work

Worth a try although it will be breaching the Sky T&C

System

unnameduser wrote: »

Thanks for all that Hengus. Not sure what the stuff in your first paragraph is but did various checks for sky support and they always came back low and they kept telling me the tests they did from their end were slow, fortunately I had saved some of the logs from the plusnet hub so had something to compare.

Will have to try to find out what sky consider 'significantly below'. Might try some snail-mail to sky as I'm not getting anywhere with the other contact options.
I wondered if them locking people in to using their out-dated equipment could come under some sort of 'restrictive practises' heading.

Unless you have a FTTP (full fibre) connection, all ISPs are reliant on BT Openreach's infrastructure to get FTTC to your home. The key factor in determining the speed that you will get is the copper line distance between your home and what is known as the PCP ( the green box that holds all the telephone connections). Next to the PCP is another green box that holds the fibre cable which will always be at maximum speed.

As the owner of the physical copper lines, Openreach and BT offer a range of speeds based on the copper line length to your home. They also offer a minimum threshold hardback speed. If a test from the master socket shows that the downstream speed is below the handback threshold then all ISPs can raise a fault with BTOR for investigation. To rule out your modem, router wiring etc, all ISPs will ask you to carry out a line speed test from the test socket before they think about calling BTOR.

By using the Availability Checker you can see what the Handback speed is for your line.

mije1983

Are you measuring your speed through WiFi or a cabled connection? I'm not aware of any ISP guaranteeing certain WiFi speeds as there are far too many variables that are out of their control.

iniltous

The OP complaint seems to be when with Plusnet they obtained a download speed of around 30Mb/s , but with Sky on identical OR equipment they get around 22Mb/s , a reduction of around 25%, and well below even Sky's own estimate of 28Mb
If it's a problem with the router poor wifi, then presumably connecting with a LAN cable will prove or disprove that as the issue, 100M or 1Gb LAN you would imagine should not be an issue with with speeds sub 30Mb/s, perhaps the OP could obtain the router stats , presuming you can access them on a Sky router

System

iniltous wrote: »

The OP complaint seems to be when with Plusnet they obtained a download speed of around 30Mb/s , but with Sky on identical OR equipment they get around 22Mb/s , a reduction of around 25%, and well below even Sky's own estimate of 28Mb
If it's a problem with the router poor wifi, then presumably connecting with a LAN cable will prove or disprove that as the issue, 100M or 1Gb LAN you would imagine should not be an issue with with speeds sub 30Mb/s, perhaps the OP could obtain the router stats , presuming you can access them on a Sky router

It is of course possible that the OP has been fiddling with his connection and DLM has kicked in. I agree router stats would give an indication of what is happening on his line.

unnameduser

Thanks all, will try and cover a few points raised.

Hengus, is this the Availability Checker dslchecker dot bt dot com [got blocked for using a url] , I have tried it in 2 browsers, enter phone number and click submit and the page just refreshes but nothing changes.

Last modem/router we had with plusnet was a plusnet hub 1, it appears to be a BT home hub 5 with a different coloured casing and which we were getting 30 Mbps through.

Done a bit of reading and I believe we are on FTTC and about a kilometre from the cabinet.

All checks done from a desktop PC connected directly to the sky hub with a cable, not certain but I think these may be line stats from the sky box:
Line Rate - Upstream (Kbps):1289
Line Rate - Downstream (Kbps):23001
Though speed tests currently come out around 1 Mbps lower than the downstream figure.

The sky people had me 'fiddling' with the connection a lot, taking the BT socket off and connecting to another socket inside and trying different filters etc., Could that have had an effect on it? The BT guy asked about that and fitted a new box but didn't comment on it.

kwikbreaks

The question is why was the Plusnet kit syncing 25% faster than the Sky hub. The thing to do is try it with the old Plusnet hub. Speed probably will not improve immediately as it is quite likely that DLM has imposed a higher default noise margin and probably interleave too. Not all modems are created equal.

unnameduser

Can't use plusnet hub, looked into that, sky do not supply the information needed to use a different modem/router, such as user name and password, their hub thing arrives ready-set up. I asked their support about it, they also said if anyone tried it they were breaking the sky fibre broadband terms, I did check and it states you must only use sky equipment.
Also I believe that the plusnet and BT hubs will only work when connected to BT's system.
I was asking the BT engineer who came, how there could be such a difference in speed as I had assumed everything would basically be the same as before but he told me that when you move to a different ISP on fibre they have to physically move your connection over onto the new ISP's equipment, so that is possibly something to do with the problem, if the equipment sky use in exchanges is anything like their modem/routers then it is understandable as the sky hub is very dated in it's features compared the the BT/plusnet hubs.