Sky On Demand Slow Download

[Matt-Ann]

Sorry if this has been covered but I've just moved home and had sky q, I have an internet speed of 380 mbs and it takes me about 20 minutes to download a movie, box is wi-fi, is there a way of checking how fast the download speed is on sky? Like a speed test etc just for the box, I'm sure it should be a lot faster than 20 minutes

[Fletcher+Jones]

Hi - this thread is for Sky+ HD boxes, not SkyQ. Totally different issue.

Sorry and good luck!

[kevinpjc]

Trying to download a 45 minute programme and after half an hour it is 6% complete.

[kevinpjc]

I did that and it went to planner, showing what was taped an taping

[Driveway]

This happened to me too, you need to press services button, select settings, tab across to network tab, press the Green  button (not the red reset button) to perform a manual network configuration and physically tap in your network name eg sky123, and then key in your network code which is on your router. . This worked for me

[Mopsie01]

sky downloads from on demand used to download in minutes same with sky cinema.now anything I download takes forever I usually give up . It's really is spoiling our enjoyment  of everything. l Any ideas.

[kevinpjc]

I had the same problem and found it was broadband, I got an extender and put it in the room where the TV with Sky and everything worked as before.

[notagain]

I found it was a DNS issue, for some reason Sky dont like many ISP's DNS servers. I set mine up manually are months of miserable download speeds I set up with a staic IP and turned DHCP off. You have to enter , IP address or the box, subnet mask, default gateway etc, its not hard but you could mess up so get help if unsure. I used OpenDNS's DNS server 208.67.222.222. After doing that downloads are back to full speed, I can start watching in seconds, so no idea whats going on with Skys DNS lookups but it seems they are pushing downloads from a servers far away, I went from 0.3Mbps to 22Mbps over 2.4Ghz wifi using OpenDNS (just better range than 5Ghz) and things are great now. I'll keep checking my ISP's DNS servers now and then but something is not working as it should be. My ISP is IDNet, and they are a small niche outfit and good, even they were surprised this was happening as nothing else is slowing down like Netflix or youtube etc. Its nothing to do with rebooting routers either, its purely DNS related.

[NewToSky]

Hi @notagain,

How strange.  Your ISP's router supplies their prefered DNS servers via the DHCP. So did the direct IP address make the difference or the DNS server change? You say Netflex etc. was not affected (I assume your Netflix host is a TV or dongel using DHCP) but then go on to say your networkwent from 0.3Mbps to 22Mbps. Was this measured while a download was in progress? If not then the issue is other than the Sky box connection. 

Assuming that the IP address supplied by your routers DHCP was not duplicated elsewhere on your network ,(manual setup on another device),  then the issue would be with the DNS server IP addresses supplied by your router. Which points to an issue on the network supporting your ISP DNS servers. 

The only time I have seen something simular to this is where a server was dual linked on a network but no IP address was configured on the second network card. Any packets arriving at the secord network port went into the wild blue yonder which made the retries rocket.

One point. Was the IP address you allocated the Sky box outside your routers DHCP range? Most routers will allow a user to reconfigure the from and to range default, allowing you to reserve an area for manual allocation. I believe this approach will avoid the slow downs associated with duplicated IP addresses.

[notagain]

Yes Netflix and YouTube works as its bundled in with a smart Sony OLED TV. The ISP has different DNS servers as you know a priimary and a secondary, neither worked for this issue with the sky HD box (my TV upscales very well  so not interested in Q yet).  When I say Network maybe I should have worded that more clearly, my routers GUI shows each device on the network and its upload and download speeds in real time ion bar chart. The Sky box when downloading using the router as the DHCP sever with my ISP's DNS loaded in the routers setting was at a lowly 0.3Mbps for the Sky HD box only, when the TV was downloading getting at a much greater piece of the bandwidth pie. The routers QoS is set to make sure this happens and devices that need greater bandwidth can be given that individually on the fly or by manually altering how many Mbps you want to give each devices on both the download and upload side should you so need. 

 You can also limit bufferbloat with a set of sliders to give a percentage to make sure say gaming devices have reserve bandwidth to stop network spikes and latency issues when say some one turns on a tablet/TV/Phone to watch Netflix/Prime etc. Yes the measurement was taken while a download was in progress before I changed the DNS server on the Sky HD box. All devices on my network use DHCP reservation so none are duplicated as the router hands out the same IP to each device, so I know where on the network all my devices are.

 The sky HD box only allows for one DNS address in manual set up, so the Sky HD box has its IP in the region of 192.168.xxx, the subnet mask is 255,255,255,0 the  gateway is the router again so in the region of 192.168.xxx and then one DNS server. I could have changed all my DNS servers to OpenDNS but my ISPs work fine for every other download and streaming service I use.  My ISP is IDNet. They have over 700 peering points and no shaping, throttling or port blocking  or contention,  within their part of the network, so nothing dodgy was going on at peak times with them and my thoughput remains pretty contant so that was not the cause.  I hope this clears up any misunderstandings.

[NewToSky]

Hi @notagain 

Thanks for the information. I was under the impression that DNS lookup only occurred once at the initiation of a link in order to obtain which IP address should be connected for the service. I believed that after that a connection no longer needed DNS. That got me to wondering if it was the fixed IP address or the changed DNS that cured the problem. If you changed to a fixed IP address but kept your ISP DNS server address would that still give speed issues? 

I note that previous download problems reported gave the fixed IP address as the cure without mention of a change of DNS server. Either way it would seem an issue for the Sky box. team.

[notagain]

Yes you are correct, fixed IP address and my ISP's DNS still gives slow downloads I even logged in (with permission of my neighbour) to his Plusnet box as I can pick that up and had the same issue until I set it up as explained using Open DNS. If you set up a static address at the device you can define your own DNS if you wish with a third party vendors which will then bypass the routers DNS settings. My skybox as I mentioned along with all my equipment has always had a fixed IP via DHCP reservation from the router. 

 For now at least it works as intended using OpenDNS who have a good reputation. Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 also works. I saw someone else on here that had changed DNS server too and things were working better. Its almost like a few ISP's are having issues reaching Sky's nearest download servers which is generally handled by a CDN like Akamai.  With so many servers world wide OpenDNS seems to find the closest one to me  I'm assuming. No idea why this should not happen with my own ISP  when all other lookups using IDNets DNS servers work just fine. Also its not just one ISP, so as you say its a job for the Sky Box Team.

[Annie+UK]

Googles DNS is another good one 8.8.8.8

[notagain]

It certainly feels like we are downloading from Timbuktu! I spoke to IDNet and they noticed a few people with this issue. I would think if thier DNS servers had issues they would know. Mine was fine until three months ago or their abouts. I'll avoid Googles DNS because its Google, OpenDNS seem to suffice for now, and Cloudflare work's well. It would be good to know why this is going on, and yes I have wondered if we have been sidelined as we are on old hardware so our downloads are slower then Sky hope we would look at the shiny Q box (no 5Ghz to non sky routers), so just 2.4Ghz 802.11n, even my Sky+HD  (2Tb DRX895) box does 5Ghz 802.11n. Q has lots of great features, that I just don't need at this time.

[missSD]

Well I was just trying to follow the steps from the 2nd post and I put my password in wrong. It then came up with 3 options, one was connect with broadband router.  All I did was press the circle button on the router with the 2 circular arrows and pressed select on my remote and it worked. Programmes downloading fine now.  If this helps anyone.