Gigafast not gigafast

[Axel905]

I've signed up to sky gigafast broadband, having previously been on the ultrafast. Sadly the speed increase has not been as expected. On ultrafast I was getting @An average of 475mb/s download, 60mb/s upload, so very good really. Decided to updgrade to gigafast as our household is a high volume user and the increase in cost felt worthwhile.

sadly the gigafast speed isn't really delivering any significant improvement. We now get an average of 605mb/s down and 100mb/s upload. Upload is better,  it downloads are no better really. We have the minimum speed guarantee of 600mb/s download, (3 consecutive days) but our line is capable of 800-1000mb/s. I did have a business gigafastfast fibre line in and that was running consistently at the full gb/s. I daftly ceased that line when I upgraded the sky package as I felt we'd have plenty of overall capacity.

sky acknowledged that we were just scrapping over the minimum speed, but said that the line was fine.

everything runs via Ethernet, and I do the test via MySky, so it's the line that isn't performing as it should, how can this be progressed? We've always had good sky services and don't really want to cancel and swap to another supplier, but the extra cost feels pointless and others are cheaper and offering faster guaranteed speeds, eg zzzooom are offering 2gb for the same price and guarantee 1.5g/b on our line.

[Chrisee]

@Axel905 all fibre lines are capable of delivering 1,000Mb/s there. If Sky accept speeds are lower than they should and meet the criteria for the speed guarantee you should be compensated https://www.sky.com/help/articles/sky-broadband-speed-guarantee

However there is no practical way to increase speeds if those results are accurate as the issue would appear to be contention. With the Openreach full fibre system a single fibre with a download capacity of 2.48Gb/s feeds a distribution pont with up to 32 connections. This is a GPON set up at some point Openreach will switch to a faster system such as XGPON but until they do you are stuck. 

Up until now reports of contention are very rare because in practice people use only a tiny fraction of the bandwidth they but unless running speedtests. This is because most activites  only use well under 100Mb/s. 

One last point my own 500Mb/s connection regularly tests by Sky at speeds well below 500Mb/s while my own tests run over the line show consistent results over 500Mb/s I raised this with Sky whonafter some shuffling of feet admitted their tests could be not 100% accurate on higher speed lines..

[Axel905]

Thanks, I think there could be an issue with contention, because just within my street of 10 houses, everyone is on gigafast and all work at home using video calling and several are high volume streamers, so definitely a possibility.

i also wondered about the router, even though the test is showing line speeds. I have the older black router, which from reading appears as though it won't support the full gb anyway. I have that black router and 2 sky boosters in the house. Would it be worth asking for the white router and pods? Obviously that won't improve the line speeds,  but it may make the user experience better, although there seems to be conflicting views, as some say the white hub isn't as good as the black one.

[Chrisee]

@Axel905 actually activities like streaming can only use 35Mb/s which is the maximum bandwidth a live sports events use for UHD/HDR uses. Zoom uses under 5Mb/s. Working from home uses far less bandwidth than you may suppose so unless youf neighbours are all video editors and then its the upload that would have contention issues first. If you believe the media we all need muitigigabit links when in practice virtually nobody does as apart from when running speed tests. When Sky first launched their streaming platform I tested my then 80Mb/s connection and could run 2 sports events in UHD and 2 in HD and still have 20Mb/s to use for other things. 

The black SR203 hub fully supports gigabit services and has gigabit ethernet ports. Its WiFi is limited to around 600Mb/s as it uses WiFi5 to get the full 900Mb/s you need to use WiFi6 which is only on the newer white WiFi Max hub but that has its own foibles. No Sky hub is ideal for larger families as they will struggle with a large number of simultaenous demands. Gamers notice this first as latency (lag) increases. If that applies buying a third party router is sensible as they can prioritise certain traffic annd overall are more poerful.