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[beavykins]

Hi,

I recently switched from BT to Sky Broadband, when I used to to speedtests it would say my nearest servers were london/maidstone which was correct and would ping around 42ms, now though on Sky it thinks my nearest servers are around birmingham/coventry it seems to think they are less than 50 miles from me which is absured... now i get around 69ms to those servers and 120ms to the ones actually nearest to me.

Is there anything I can do about this? I don't see why it would route my traffic to Birmingham and then back again, is it just that sky have a poor network structure or have they made a mistake?

Thanks.

[jeffbb]

Hi
I wouldn't worry about the so called nearest survey. I am on anglesey in North Wales and yet the recommended server is Maidstone ,With a ping of 90msec. I have used Paris (Yes in France ) That most times gives a lower Ping <60 and quite often a better throughput.

These speedtesters are NOT 100% . The best way is to try different servers and when you find one with a reasonable ping then use that as a guide .Don't forget that these servers can also be oversubscribed .

Regards Jeff

[beavykins]

hm, but playing games on servers I used to get 45ms pings, now i get 66ms... so there is a rise of 20ms there too. I didn't think changing supplier would have that much impact.

[GunJack]

Hi
I wouldn't worry about the so called nearest survey. I am on anglesey in North Wales and yet the recommended server is Maidstone ,With a ping of 90msec. I have used Paris (Yes in France ) That most times gives a lower Ping <60 and quite often a better throughput.
Regards Jeff

funny enough, I'm in Wrexham and until relatively recently, Paris was my most consistent server in terms of ping and speed. Last few months, though, I've been using Sittingbourne, Milton Keynes and Maidenhead.

jeff's dead right, you end up knowing what your line should do with each of them, so you can tell if anything's amiss. Using 3 of them also helps show if there's an issue at one of them, rather than with your line.

[beavykins]

Yeh but I don't get why my ping has gone up by 20ms switching provider, I thought because it registered my nearest servers as up north that it may be the reason for the extra ms, although checking now the nearest server has moved even further north (manchester) and still thinks its under 50miles away. I am within the '10 day line testing time' or whatever it's called so maybe it will keep moving around til it finds the optimum?

[kitz]

>> it thinks my nearest servers are around birmingham/coventry

Where did that info come from.

This can often be wrong, my own is 100's of miles out.
If you got that info from the speedtesters, its often a best guess..  and if you are on a dynamic IP you could even be picking up recorded info from previous users.

In fact Ive only had 2 IPs in 7 yrs of adsl, and the closest any of them have got is about 60 miles out.  Most of the time its way wrong.

-----


Sky use interleaving and error correction on lines..   this WILL increase your latency.   It is possible to request them to reduce the depth of your interleaving which should reduce your ping times.

[beavykins]

Do you think the sky router could be a factor in the 20ms ping rise then? I was on a (pretty old now) DG834 before which never let me down, im never too sure about the 'free' routers you get, but im sure I read it is against sky's terms and conditions to use your own router, is this true?

[jeffbb]

Hi
I don't think they can stop You using another router ,but they will NOT give you any support for a non sky one . You should be able to get that info from your documentation,contract terms of reference.

Regards Jeff

[Wildy]

Sky's official line is that it's against their terms, but I don't think they go out of their way to enforce it.  I 've been using a netgear router for several months now without a problem.  Worth keeping in mind, though, that there have been occasional reports of people getting cut off for using a non-sky router.

The tricky bit is getting Sky's router to give up your username and password

[beavykins]

Thanks for the advice, you will be pleased to hear though that yesterday my router seems to have resynced and is now a lot better. It dropped about 100k off the speed (now 1529) and my ping is so much better. I was getting around 47 with BT which went up to about 62 when i switched to Sky, but that has now dropped to about 34.

wooohooo! it's a shame my bandwidth is so low but that is all i can expect to get this far from the exchange. i was getting about 300k untill i removed the bell wire!

Thanks again