Packet Loss (or, Sky Stream is a rubbish product)

[martingill]

So after MULTIPLE calls to Sky, where agents promise to do things (they don't),  give me conflicting instructions, tell me what my issue is (which is different to what the previous agent told me), don't bother to put notes into the CRM so make me repeate myself every call, and then try and charge me more money to replace my stream puck and tell me they can't refund me, even though a previous agent refunded me last time... I'm now being told that my puck keeps losing connection because of packet loss to the router.

#ItsBTsFaultNotOurs... 

I'll call BT and check (nothing else in the house stops working randomly - alexa, fire tv, ring doorbell, etc), but seriously why can't your people give me a consistent answer, and why is the stream puck so sensitive that it can't cope with packet loss form the router without needing a hard reboot every time it goes into standby? When your serious answer is "can you get a physical cable connection" for a wifi product...

After about 3 remotes, it is not a product fit for general release. 

[MarkGoldsmith]

The Sky devices aren't like most devices they need a constant connection to Skys servers as everything is cloud based, barely anything is stored locally on the puck or tv. As a result dropped packets as a result of WiFi signals that aren't strong and stable will cause issues.

A number of customers find that Ethernet works better as a result rather than WiFi as the WiFi signal strength will vary house to house due to numerous factors which can cause instability and interference. Equally some customers have success with WiFi using things like a mesh network. As it provides much strong stable networks than just a standard router provided by most ISPs.

[martingill]

I appreciate yo arent' a Sky employee and thanks for the info. After numerous calls to Sky "diagnosing" the problem I finally learned this yesterday. It would have been nice of the first, second or 3rd agent told me this rather than diagnosing the device as broken, promsing to ship a new one, then repeatedly failing, then asking me to pay for it having previously offered to refund me payment.

If you sell a product as a WiFi streaming product and it needs a reboot every time it sufferes a minor network interruption, or the answer is "plug in ethernet" then really... its not a wifi streaming product. Its rubbish design if its built to only work under ideal conditions and have very little fault tolerance. The technical caveats weren't made clear when I bought it. 

[MarkGoldsmith]

They sell it as a "streaming" product and don't usually specify WiFi in any marketing dross, which I guess is their workaround.

i do agree that the average customer would expect the product to just work connected to WiFi providing their internet speed was higher than the minimum recommended 30 Mbps.

the whole issue is due to the fact that absolutely everything is stored on Skys cloud servers. Why they have chosen to implement it this way who knows, could be related to some complicated legal issues, could be cost related, likely a combination of several factors.

i do find that most customers who aren't tech savvy are having to come into this forum to ask questions and be advised about which settings to turn off to improve the experience. In my view if my customers are having to disable a specific setting maybe it shouldn't be on by default or maybe Skys setup guide should explicitly mention these settings and why you may want to turn them on or off.

it seems quite counterintuitive as many users are used to just plugging in something like an Apple TV or Amazon fire stick, connecting it to the WiFi and it just working. Obviously all these devices have local hard disks where the majority of information and apps are stored and the internet connection is only needed to stream the actual shows and tnis type of setup can easily handle dropped packets.

personally I think the product is good, if you can get it to function as is expected. Ive had very little issues with my stream in the 3 months I've had it, once I switched it over from WiFi to Ethernet after day 3. I've got no issues with the small lag you get with opening apps and having to be slower when navigating the system but a lot of people are quite impatient 😀.