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[Geekofbroadband]

So our contract ends in around 4 months and our last BT bill was over £110 so we were looking at Sky Fibre as they have a phone package right for us which would stay around £45 a month because of free calls.

How does Sky Fibre compare to BT Fibre with gaming, routing, DLM, IP's, etc.. don't Sky have their own backhaul that isn't shared so it should be the same or if not better than BT?

[N0STIE]

Yeah, I used to have Sky ADSL2+ for less than 2 hours, because of my .... dad that ordered it by mistake. I was away, the engineer came in and installed everyting and the pings were 45ms to bbc.co.uk. When I came back, instantly switched to BT Infinity.

[skyeci]

Been with sky for many years. Fibre pro support tream are good to deal with but did not find normal support that great.
When I moved to fibre from adsl I had no end of problems but this was down to my line rather than sky and to be fair there was no issue organising an engineer which turned out to be 3 visits which they seemee happy to authorise.

I am on fast path on an eci cabinet  current latency is about 12-14ms. Sky told me in my exchange they had no equipmemt so I am assuming I am on BT kit anyway...

[Chrysalis]

latency will depend on your proximity to a sky (easynet) POP.  In my case there is a POP in my city and as a result my latency is about 7-8ms lower (45-50%) than what I had on BT wholesale which has to go to north before heading to london.  8-10ms to bbc vs 15-16ms.  I have never experienced congestion on sky's backhaul, nor have I read about others experiencing congestion on the backhaul either.  Sky's LINX peering and backhaul capacity when calculated to find availability per user is favourable vs BT.  However we dont know how much private peering sky have vs BT.

So in terms of ping stability, packet loss and throughput sky is excellent.  However I dont know what your base latency will be as it is dependent on POP proximity.

The only issue I have with sky is I think their youtube CDN capacity is lacking compared to BT.  An issue I currently have raised with sky tech support, on BT (and plusnet) youtube was so reliable I relied on it to measure my performance.

pings to bbc I did earlier (Whilst downloading but not affected due to the excellent codel shaper I have on my router). Sorry guys codel not yet available on any publicly released ASUS firmware.

Code: [Select]

C:\Windows\system32>ping bbc.co.uk

Pinging bbc.co.uk [212.58.244.22] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.58.244.22: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=56
Reply from 212.58.244.22: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=56
Reply from 212.58.244.22: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=56
Reply from 212.58.244.22: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=56

Ping statistics for 212.58.244.22:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 8ms, Maximum = 9ms, Average = 8ms

[skyeci]

meh...

not much in it Chrys - I don't think we have an a sky pop in my town.

Pinging www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.244.66] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=56
Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=56
Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=56
Reply from 212.58.244.66: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=56

Ping statistics for 212.58.244.66:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 10ms, Average = 9ms

slightly better 
ping bbc.co.uk

Pinging bbc.co.uk [212.58.244.22] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.58.244.22: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=56
Reply from 212.58.244.22: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=56
Reply from 212.58.244.22: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=56
Reply from 212.58.244.22: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=56

Ping statistics for 212.58.244.22:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 9ms, Average = 9ms

[Geekofbroadband]

Hi thanks for the replies. So whats a POP, can I find out if theirs one near me?

I have Sky enabled at my exchange if that makes any difference,

http://i.imgur.com/XUhXAhP.png     

http://i.imgur.com/AidJYVc.png or is that just Sky equipment in the exchange

[skyeci]

Not sure but sky told me they had no equipment in the exchange anyway so its probably bt equipment I guess. The  fibre engineer also told me I was on BT kit when I had some repairs done.

[Chrysalis]

is point of presence, what you might consider a node on the backhaul network.  Not related to having exchange dslam equipment.  The sky traffic from the exchange has to first go to at least one POP before routed to transit/peers etc.

skyeci without dslam in the exchange you wouldnt have sky FTTC, they only sell that in their LLU exchanges.

I can no longer find a network map for easynet/sky, but from what I remember they have less POPs than BT, but that was a several years old map I looked at back in the ukonline days.  Sky have upgraded the network repeatedly since then.

[kitz]

Sky did a presentation last year at one of the ISP events showing their brand new NG network. 
I nabbed a copy of the presentation notes.


---
Edited to remove attachment during clean-up

[skyeci]

Nice. Thanks for that.

[Chrysalis]

page 12 seems to be a network map but it doesnt name the locations of the smaller POPs.  Looks like the number has significantly increased tho from the ukonline days.

[lool]

So our contract ends in around 4 months and our last BT bill was over £110 so we were looking at Sky Fibre as they have a phone package right for us which would stay around £45 a month because of free calls.

How does Sky Fibre compare to BT Fibre with gaming, routing, DLM, IP's, etc.. don't Sky have their own backhaul that isn't shared so it should be the same or if not better than BT?

There is no difference, TBH. Sky doesn't have equipment in the exchange nor access to the DLM.

[mlmclaren]

This is a BQM for a Sky LLU (ADSL2+) line in South Birmingham...



Its a light usage line, syncs at around 11/1mbps

[Chrysalis]

There is no difference, TBH. Sky doesn't have equipment in the exchange nor access to the DLM.

Wrong.

Sky have access to choosing which DLM profile to use and they use a more conservative profile, meaning on sky fibre you are more likely to be interleaved than on BT fibre.  BT use speed, sky use standard.

Also sky do have equipment in exchanges and actually will not sell you sky fibre unless your cabinet is routed to one of their LLU exchanges.  In the case of FTTC, the dslam's deployed by sky for their LLU ADSL services are still used to handover traffic from openreach to sky backhaul.  Now in terms of ping times and ping stability, then the distance to a sky POP vs distance to a BT pop, will affect base latency as well as if there is any congestion on either network.

Issues sadly have been publicly known about on WBC shared for a while, but WBC dedicated congestion levels seem to be respectably very low.  BT retail uses the latter. Likewise sky backhaul has very low levels of known congestion.  There is a few ramblings about congested BT VP's on exchanges, but I suspect those are misdiagnosed from WBC shared issues.

[lool]

Wrong.

Sky have access to choosing which DLM profile to use and they use a more conservative profile, meaning on sky fibre you are more likely to be interleaved than on BT fibre.  BT use speed, sky use standard.

Also sky do have equipment in exchanges and actually will not sell you sky fibre unless your cabinet is routed to one of their LLU exchanges.  In the case of FTTC, the dslam's deployed by sky for their LLU ADSL services are still used to handover traffic from openreach to sky backhaul.  Now in terms of ping times and ping stability, then the distance to a sky POP vs distance to a BT pop, will affect base latency as well as if there is any congestion on either network.

Issues sadly have been publicly known about on WBC shared for a while, but WBC dedicated congestion levels seem to be respectably very low.  BT retail uses the latter. Likewise sky backhaul has very low levels of known congestion.  There is a few ramblings about congested BT VP's on exchanges, but I suspect those are misdiagnosed from WBC shared issues.

Dang, I wish that was true. Otherwise they wouldn't sent out FTTC3 engineers for DLM reassessment. They're no even the ones adjust it, more like call DCoE to do it. Sky can make it Stable/Fastpath/etc, but if you're on the Pro package you can adjust that yourself. On the ADSL one I am sure of at least. Anyway, access to the actual DLM fine settings is restricted to them. But yeah, it goes in Sky's backaul, but I've never heard of that to be congested, cable link gets it, if anything. So it gets routed to Sky's backhaul and it has a @skydsl logon, that's about the difference.