Gigafast and Sky Q

[plewsandrew]

I've been on gigafast for about a year now and have Sky Q with 3 mini boxes and Sky Hub 4.2.

Is it worth having Gigabit with this setup? Seems I will never never access the higher speeds through booster. Looking through the forum it looks like the kit can't provide anywhere near the download speed and speed test never top 500mb/s next to router.

[Chrisee]

@plewsandrew the Sky hub 4.2 (SR203) is limited to WiFi5 which will not achieve more than around 650Mb/s. While you could buy Sky's WiFi Max bundle which comes with a WiFi6 hub I wouldn't while you have Sky Q as the new hubs are not compatable with the Sky Q mesh while your existing hub is so your Sky Q boxes act as WiFi hot spots which you lose with the hub change.

Add in that Sky Q was designed well before wifi speeds over 200Mb/s were a requirement in domestic set ups the technology struggles with higher speeds. Given most apps cannot use 200Mb/s having 900Mb/s is pretty pointless unless you are downloading large files. While you can access the full 900Mb/s over a gigabit ethernet link downgrasding to 500Mb/s would have minimal practical impact. However note while Sky allow upgrades while in the fixed contract term they dont allow downgrades..

[plewsandrew]

Hmmmmmm........ thanks for the reply. It isn't until you look at the forum that I wondered what the point was of gigabit. Why would sky sell a product that isn't usable or compatible with the equipment provided?

[JimM1]

@plewsandrew It is usable, you just need to have it on a cable! same as having 900Mb/s nice to have and 10% utilised.

[Chrisee]

@plewsandrew Sky sell what people want to buy. Sky Q is an old product designed iaround 2015 with a limited future life as satellite broadcasting in the UK is likely to stop in the next 5 years and many customers have already switched to Sky Stream not that needs great speed the pucks can only ever use 30Mb/s each.

Personally I do not understand the clamour for ever higher speeds - Sky now offer up to 5Gb/s through City Fibre - but people seem to want to throw their money at them. All  of these products use shared connection to the exchange so not everyone can get the top speed at the same time. Your Openreach Gigabit connection shares a pipe with 2.48Gb/s capacity with up to 30 of your neighbours. Prety obviously nit all of you can access 900Mb/s at the sametime. That it works at all which it does is testament that most people use a tiny fraction of the bandwidth they buy. 

[JimM1]

@plewsandrew The official and straight from OR Openreach.

1. FTTP is a contended service, up to 32 users can be sharing the 2.5Gb backhaul, so you can never expect the full speed all the time, you may get 900mb when there are fewer people using it. I expect that you are sharing the backhaul with many users. If everyone was using it fully, you may only get 78mbs. Its called statistical multiplexing, which relies on the fact that all users are not utilising their connection fully, all of the time.

BT quote up to 900mb, so you are likely to get much less than that during peak times.

Speed tests pass very little data, so normally give a much higher speed.

2. The max OR connect to a splitter is 30 ( 32 is the splitter maximum but policy is 30 ) not every CBT port provided is likely to have a customer using it , so unless on a ‘new site’ that has no alternatives to OR FTTP the actual number on a splitter is likely to be way less , OR currently have about a 30% take up, so maybe 10 users per splitter , plus the majority don’t take 900Mb but slower profiles , and the chances of those ‘on line ‘ at any one time all and doing something intensive, rather than browsing / Netflix that may be consuming less than 30-100Mb , is slim , that’s why there is a 700Mb minimum speed guarantee on 900Mb …..the 2.4Gb will be plenty ,you would have to be incredibly unlucky to have any consistent congestion.

If you suspect PON congestion, try at a time when there won’t be much activity, late evening or early morning .

Although you have tried somethings to ‘ isolate’ the problem , the most obvious thing to do ( that you haven’t apparently tried ) is use the BT router , without doing that , you haven’t really proved anything , your third party router may great , but even great routers can be mis configured or faulty