Sky drops download limit and tops satisfaction poll Sky has dropped gigabyte download restrictions on its "Max" package in order to offer unlimited broadband without any "fair use policy" chicanery. The terms of its LLU ADSL2+, £10 per month product were quietly altered in mid-August to drop the caveats. Limits on downloads for both new and existing customers have disappeared, …
I currenlty have Plus net and will stick with them until the new year to see what happens. I currently have unlimited during off-peak and a 20GB limit during Peak times of 16:00-23:59. But I have to say with this package it is becoming more enticing to leave and move everything to Sky.
Until they get enough users signed up and then realise they can't really support so many "Unlimited" sessions?
I personally don’t believe anything web related (disk space, bandwidth, uploads / downloads etc) should be sold as unlimited. There is always a finite limit to what can be provided.
I jumped from VM about 6 months ago, apart from SKY's stupid naff little modem/router which can't port forward(!), which I replaced with a LinkSYS, I have nothing but praise for the value for money and service I got. I have downloaded dirty great distros, Oracle kit and other large, ahem offerings. The speed is solid and dependable even during the "rush hour". I only get 5.5MB/s on a 16MB line, but even at that speed it's a darn sight cheaper than VM's naff little 2M service which I was paying £30/month for!
Be Unlimited and Be Pro both offer truly unlimited downloads. With Pro I get 16.1 down and 2.1 up and a static IP. Ok it isn't as cheap as Sky, but with Sky you have to have phone or TV anyway, and as I dont generally get to watch TV other than Top Gear and have a mobile I do not use either of the above.
The gravestone as El Reg consistently do not mention Be*
"...but it is among the cheapest (assuming you've got satellite TV). "
You forgot to add:
...AND live in a connurbation.
I have three broadband connections and three Sky subscriptions in different parts of England, but NONE of them qualify for Sky broadband offers.
Since the cost of providing the satellite TV service is uniform across the country, it means that I am subsidising every one else's Sky broadband and phones?
I don't what "crappy little router" you got, but with my Sky BB Max I got a Sky branded Netgear one and it works a treat. Port forwarding, Dynamic DNS, decent wifi reception, and a 15.5Mbps connection (still disappointing when you can see the exchange from your front door).
I'd happily recommend moving the lot - when BT pulled their little "sign up for 1 year minimum to get free evening and weekend calls" stunt (after 10 years of being loyal, they wanted me to be loyal or pay more...) we moved line rental and broadband over and in the process saved over £15 a month.
And as far as installation goes, I've never, ever, had an easier broadband self-install.
BTW, my fave broadband site is http://www.samknows.com/broadband/ - tells you the techy details about your exchange and gives you a list of LLU operators in a nice, easy to read list.
I had Sky and I liked it on the whole, tech support was and is naff, Level one staff in SE Asia, Newcastle and NI are the pits, the South American lot are great though, actually able to tell someone who knows about computers from the usual drool merchant callers.
O2 is to Be* as UKOnline is to Sky, same ownership diff packages and have heard Be* seem to be better at sorting things out, (Still not enabled on my exchange...current estimate is now end of november...was october...sigh :( )
On the subject of ThinkBroadband I recently gave up posting comments on stories there due to people attempting to shout me down when I pointed out they were talking out of a hole in their arse. (my reply within parenthesis )
For example
"Criminal gangs can use your wireless from 5 miles away, I saw it on the BBC" - (if they could it would be slow as treacle due to the decrease in throughput/speed with every repeat given wireless has a best case 100metre useable distance and panorama is no better than the worst of the tabloids for journalism quality)
"You obviously know nothing about wireless and your naive, I suggest using a timer to turn your router on and off multiple times a day is the best solution to wireless security" -> (yeah if you want to fry it maybe from minor repeated shocks to the electronics...try WPA or WPA2 [I included simple descriptions of what WPA and WEP are for the "man in the street")
*sigh* Can't we ban muppets from IT sites to stop them spreading harmful information.....idiots like *cough* comnut *cough* make me want to acquaint him with the BOFH's insulation tester
I use to work as tech support in the US and one of the locations had users with one-way modem. If you wanted always on you would need an extra phone line. But for this you got downloads over satelitte and uploads over phone lines. This would mean some customers getting connection speeds at rediculous levels compared to other Cable and ADSL packages at 3 and 4 times the cost.
"By Chris Williams Posted Wednesday 17th September 2008 14:15 GMT
O2 is Be*.
- Chris"
sure BE* seems good, and they apparently have the UKs best generic upload speeds available and their ratio isnt so bad for that at around 8 to 12/1.
Virgin Media have BY FAR the WORST official broadband RATIO IN THE WHOLE UK, perhaps most of the developed world infact,26/1 and it going to get even werse with the 34/1 D/U ratio that the new 50/1.5 Mbit will bring., neil doesnt want you to know this , never mind covering it in broadband news stories.
how about covering this BB ratio subject ElReg writers, we need to let the wider paying customers know and make the UK wake up.
it really comical that BE on old copper wire are easy beating the so called VM fibre upload rates by miles and for a very long time now, all because Neil wants to save cash for his executive teams bank accounts at the expense of massively reduced UBR/linecard spend and over subscription of NW (baguley building)served and other area's.
how about switching to, and highlighting the RATIO of the UK ISP providers offerings far more in news stories, so as to get that far better indicator in the minds of the dumb users that think download is everything.
download isnt everything , you NEED far better upload to service your download requests and you end users need to start understanding this, and demand better upload ratio's with your payments every month.
for instance that new Virgin Media 34/1 upload/download ratio for the 50Mbit/s package comeing out, the UPLOAD rate will never sustain that full binary download speed as its not high enough as a generic ratio , they might just as wel advertise it as 100Mbit as your not goin got see that speed eather with such a low upload ration.
its clear VM wil be breaking yet another false advertising law as mentioned in the story above if they dont increase the upload ratio so you can get the generic download speed your paying for in your contract.
This post has been deleted by its author
providing they don't change the TOS again when they have boosted their customer base. It's sad but life has taught me to be cynical.
I may investigate, If Sky broadband is available without the TV or other services I could be interested, but the thought of giving money to Rupert Murdoch does put me off.
Cynical and principled, makes life difficult.
I've just moved from Sky to Be (I didn't want to pay for TV that I never watch any more, and Be had just become available - otherwise I had no problems with Sky apart from the router being crap), and I never had any complaints from Sky for breaching download limits / AUP / FUP nonsense.
I think my heaviest month topped 700 GB, so they obviously didn't care that much before...
Still, nice to have it in writing. Like Be do.
i switched from pipex (bastards screwed me over royally tried to charge me £1000 because they switched my package without informing me) to sky 16mbit and i have to say it really does create a slight twinge in my groin area every time i go to download stuff
and i mean EVERY time, i regularly max it out at 1.4mb/s from places that allow such speeds, and from what i've seen they don't turn the dial down during peak times
i literally couldn't be happier with broadband, its like the first time i switched from dial up to adsl some 10 years back!
Are you on an LLU enabled exchange ? (http://www.samknows.com to check) - if not, Sky use a "bought in" service which is inferior to their full LLU broadband service.
It might also be worth you looking at your line stats to see if you've got a crap noise margin, and checking that you haven't got any faults on your internal wiring (unscrew the face plate, and plug the router directly into the test socket behind the face plate - if the speed picks up, you've got an internal fault you need to investigate)
I've been with them since the end of March 2007 and it's been the best ISP for reliability i've known since I first got on the net in around 1995 ! (having said that, there were a couple of hours downtime last night, not sure whether it was a local mains fault that caused it... it's certainly the first downtime I recall though !)
Just a reminder to all of those that are forecasting the collapse of Sky's network due to the massive downloads by all those switching to the unlimited Max accounts. Sky sells broadband to Sky TV customers, no one else. So you better be prepared to become a Sat TV customer to do the downloads. Personally I've never had a problem but then I suspect I've never broken 100GB in a month, and that mostly MSDN and various Linux distros for testing, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Some of you guys really are negative cnuts - try giving credit where its due.
"what about the true cost of sending all that data over their network? Surely £10 + TV sub cannot cover it if someone downloads hundreds of Gigs a month..."
I have the £5 per month, 8gb service ( and I actually get a 8gb service too ).
Ive consistently downloaded appox 15 gb per month for over 12 months now without any problems. From my experience, I think everyone's been unlimited from day one - not bad for £5 per month, and £15 for the TV. compares quite well with the £ 24 a month I have to pay BT/BBC for services which I dont use.
"Although it restricts the heaviest users' speeds at peak times, Virgin Media doesn't ration data"
It's pretty close to rationing, when you consider that (the last time I checked) peak times are classed by VM as 10am to 3pm & 4pm to 9pm ie. most of the useable day. And if you download more than 300MB during these times, your speeds are throttled right back for another 5 hours.
Try & find this fact on their website though -it's kept well hidden.
As the title says, shifting those bytes costs the ISP's money. After suffering a VM cable connection for a few months (BBC site timed out at 6pm on a regular basis) I'm cynical about any 'unlimited' claims. Packet shaping is almost certainly used by nearly all ISP's now so Sky are probably no different. The big difference is that NOTHING would tempt me to put money into the hands of the Dirty Digger, no matter how good the company they bought are (look it up, it ends with NET).
I strongly suspect the 'no limits' is a loss leader designed to win market share, lets see how quickly its dumped once its done its job.
"Currently most providers don't tell their customers how many gigabytes are considered "fair", because admitting to a number would mean "unlimited" (fair use policy applies) marketing campaigns would breach advertising regulations."
Weird that, the ASA don't seem to mind at all: http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/adjudications/Public/TF_ADJ_45008.htm
and no real problems, I can only get 2.7meg but I do live quite far from the exchange and the most a BT bundled service could offer was 1meg so I;m happy enough. There was a 40gig cap on it but I reckon with my speeds I could never have got anywhere near it until sopcast and TVU, so it's good to see I shouldn't get any problems now.
BeThere might give the performance, but they justifiably score badly for customer support. I'm not alone with getting extremely pissed off with poor quality call centers (Eastern European with poor English speakers reading scripts (Bulgaria ?)) and slow response (2-7 days normally beyond call acceptance) with their online system. Oh and always being told it's not their fault.
From what I've read of the O2 customer service it sounds like they are using their own central call centres rather than BeThere's.
8gb?...8 megabits maybe? unless you have fibre link hidden somewhere?
@ bandwidth costs money
Might happen but personally I dont see it happening, its a useful hook to persuade people who dont have sky tv to take it on, plus news corp (skys parent company) have very deep pockets.
Its like supermarkets policy on bread pricing...sell it for less than cost to get peoples attention and get them interested in other products
... if rather than traffic 'shaping', they'll go to traffic 'removal' by booting subscribers who P2P.
I'm hoping that the next round of Sky hardware will support broadband rather than PSTN for its call home, and allow for iPlayer like functionality directly with the Sky Box (provided of course you get your BB from Sky :D )
I've had Sky BB since the beginning of the year. We switched from Virgin because I got an offer of a full Sky+ tv package at 1/2 price for 12 months through my company and we decided to take up the £10 a month for 16Mb service as I was working from home on and off and the speed came in handy. Plus I like downloading large torrent files!
The broadband service has been patchy, not I hasten to add, due to any fault of Sky's but because the line from my house to the streetside box needs replacing and BT are too cheap to do it. So every 3 or 4 months I've had to go through the hassle of raising a ticket with Sky to confirm that it was nothing at their end that was causing my line to operate at under 512kbps and then calling BT to arrange for an engineer to come out and swap our line onto a new pair. This has now happened 3 times and I had to make dozens of calls to Sky to acheive this.
I can only praise the attitude of the Sky tech support staff. They were quick and courteous at all times (and I found the weekend staff were better that the weekday ones!). My only problem with them is that the team responsible for the fault never actually contacted me directly to say that the issue/trouble ticket was being closed or checked if the problem had actually been resolved we just got a computerised voice mail on our BT 1571 to say "Your issue has been resolved" which a couple of times meant I had to phone up and open another ticket.
My line is currently at 7782Kbps downstream or something similar and has been for over a month with no discernible problems during peak hours.
Virgin Media definitely DO limit downloads with a speed cap during peak hours. I've been with VM for 8 years and on the 20 meg package you get limited to 500KBPS once you've DL'ed 2GB. Peak hours seem to me to be 4PM to 12AM. Don't bother trying to talk to their tech support about it as they don't even know what traffic shaping is let alone how they are applying it or download throttles.
Saying that, the VM 10meg package is the one to go for as they can actually sustain 10meg (barring the throttling). With the 20meg you'll rarely see it and performance can and does drop as low as 70Kbps (at any time). With the 10 meg it stays at 10 meg consistently (barring throttling).
All I know is I'm getting 15.5Mbs for £10 compared to 4Mbs for £25 off VM. After one phone call I got a setting changed to decrease my latency in online games to lower than VM's was. The connection is solid, has been completely problem free and is neither throttled nor Phormed.
I couldn't give a toss what everyone else's experience is or isn't. I'm laughing mate so stick that in yer pipe and smoke it. Muahahaha!
unfortunatly sky are still in bed with the BPI and seeing as there is absolutly zero need for "unlimited" broadband unless your downloading ISO's etc. I cant see this move as being a boon. A bit with the BPI and a bit with Phorm I am considering a move aweh from sky
paris cause she likes to download one night in paris
ARTICLE IS SLIGHTLY INACCURATE:
"Although it restricts the heaviest users' speeds at peak times, "
This applies ONLY to a customer who is not on Sky's network, Sky Connect where IPstream is used to re-sell the BT product.
There is NO TRAFFIC SHAPING/THROTTLING etc etc at ANY time and they state it here:
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=900698
"There is NO TRAFFIC SHAPING/THROTTLING etc etc at ANY time and they state it here:
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=900698"
Try this one...
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showpost.php?p=27541748
T&Cs clearly state they will *optionally* traffic manage the heaviest users between 5pm and 12am. They will certainly monitor use in this period.
Like with many ISPs who've gone down this route they're not stating how much is too much and only quote a finger in the air figure of 2% of users will be affected (which I'm sure will be a gross underestimate). Past experience has been that this leads to heavier implementations of traffic management over time.
What it all comes down to is capacity. If they are running short of capacity they WILL traffic manage unless they invest in more capacity (which means price rises). It's either that or everyone grinds to a halt.
Should be noted that Sky Max is an LLU product and as such is not going to benefit from BT's 21CN upgrade which is rolling out (which will delivery "up to" 24mbps amongst other things, including much better Quality of Service, greater flexibility for ISPs and cost savings).
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