At 7:52 AM on Friday 13 April 2012, I placed my order to upgrade my broadband service to the long awaited and newly launched Sky Fibre Broadband. Not a bad Friday the Thirteenth.
Two weeks later, on 27 April 2012, an Openreach engineer phoned me from the street cabinet to say he was about to connect my line to the fibre cabinet. Ten minutes later, he turned up to install a vDSL faceplate on the master phone socket and fix the Openreach fibre modem (the Huawei HG612) to the wall.
We chatted and had a cup of tea while he worked. Finally he ran some tests and showed me the results on his gizmo (JDSU). “Should be good for about 70Mbps max” he said. He waited while I connected the Sky router and got online, and he insisted on seeing the result of a speed test. About 36Mbps. Bit of a speed bump from the 3.5Mbps download speed on ADSL. Wowwww!
Wind forward to today - one year later. What has it been like to have a “superfast” broadband connection?
The obvious thing is that file downloads, software upgrades, movie rentals and Catch Up TV all download much faster. No more buffering - movies and on demand viewing is ready to watch almost immediately.
Upload is much faster too. Sky Fibre began as a “40/2” service, providing an up to 2Mbps upload speed. After a few weeks was upgraded to a “40/10” service, giving an up to 10Mbps upload speed. Sharing files and documents to “cloud” based services is now much more feasible.
Reliability has been excellent, throughput speed has been steady. To date, I have not been affected by the two major issues that have been hot topics on the Sky Help Forum: the “half-speed”/slow throughput problem that has been affecting some fibre users, and backhaul network congestion (which has been a problem for both fibre and ADSL users at some exchanges).
What about the future outlook for Sky Fibre?
Hopefully:
- Successful completion of the fix rollout for he “half-speed”/slow throughput problem.
- Faster resolution of backhaul network congestion problems.
- A product/price restructuring to match Sky’s popular competitors.
Happy 1st Birthday to Sky Fibre.
