Sky Ireland Fibre Broadband

airuser

12 months since Fibre was released, over nine months for Sky to trail their product and still no news on Fibre product being released to the market.

Sky must really have some superb product to release to its customers.

Sky locked their forum on fibre and also on those enquiring about RTE HD.

Sky is just supplying bland answers

Sky Reps are mostly based in UK. So do not know the market here.

Sky ask survey to be filled out. Do they ever read them, from their Irish subscribers

positron

I switched from Sky to Vodafone coupe of months back. Living at the back of a 18 year old estate, I was only getting 2.5 mbps with Sky. Vodafone efibre was 17 mbps solid. Since then the vectoring has been enabled and I am getting 28 mbps. Happy days!!

airuser

positron wrote: »

I switched from Sky to Vodafone coupe of months back. Living at the back of a 18 year old estate, I was only getting 2.5 mbps with Sky. Vodafone efibre was 17 mbps solid. Since then the vectoring has been enabled and I am getting 28 mbps. Happy days!!

Just been with some friends, just installed fibre. was getting 5 now 15, fat from 70. But solid speeds.

AlanS181824

Hopefully it'll be soon.

keno-daytrader

Sky Ireland director JD Buckley was on the Pat Kenny show this morning talking about the new GAA contract. It seemed like one big ad for Sky and all of its products.

Broadband was spoken about at some length however not one word about Sky Fibre. Every other product or feature of Sky seemed to be mentioned except Sky Fibre.

I text the show and asked about it, but it wasnt read out on air.

I cant understand Sky's approach to broadband in Ireland, most customers will now be coming off their 1 year contract and will be signing up to fibre from Vodafone or Eircom and will be signing 18mos contracts. A foolish way to compete for business on Sky's part. As the "trialing" has been going on now for almost a year on Sky fibre.

SpaceTime

I think they've made a really big mistake by not just launching day one with fibre.

I suspect the issue is that they've signed a binding agreement with BT Ireland to provide ADSL.

Then again I'm pretty sure BT Wholesale could solve that too.

It seems a bit silly of Sky to be throwing customers away though.

airuser

SKY did sign with BT who in turn have to buy from Eircom. It is just a huge loop.

Sky has locked their forum on Fibre.

A few of my friends who were with SKY have left them and two is gone to Eircom and the other to Vodafone.

When Sky are dealing with Complaints on their forum, co-ordinators are based in the UK. So the Irish ISP side does not rate I believe with them.

SpaceTime

BT have to buy access from eircom wholesale regardless. They need physical lines from the exchange to the end users and a lot of smaller exchanges wouldn't be using BT DSLAMs anyway as they aren't unbundled.

The concept with this new product is ' virtual unbundling '. They can't realistically duplicate the whole access network. It involves thousands of cabinet locations.

airuser

It is plain or simple SKY are not going to supply Fibre anytime soon.

Let us hope I am wrong.

OneEightSeven

airuser wrote: »

It is plain or simple SKY are not going to supply Fibre anytime soon.

Let us hope I am wrong.

So plain and simple you didn't even need to offer an explanation.

BONDIred

Called up yesterday to cancel Sky BB, guy in cancellations didnt even try to keep me as a customer.

Told them I was getting less than 2mb on sky, he said they cant offer me any more as 5mb is the max for my line.

Told him efibre was in my area and I was told speeds up to 70mb, gave me my UAN and said move to Eircom.

I asked about Sky fibre, and he said will defo not be this year and to come back to sky in about 12 months and check to see if Sky fibre is available.

SpaceTime

That really is bizarre.

airuser

Sky will not give any definite answer as to when. CS SKY have no idea either.

With other companies not alone going Fibre but also "vectoring " , noise cancelling on the line to give even faster speeds.

Are we facing another BT ? SKY customer base being sold to one of the other ISP.

If that happened we would get the speeds. But as when BT sold to VF one got poorer speeds for a while, then an improvement. The CS was very poor indeed.

airuser

SpaceTime wrote: »

That really is bizarre.

Yes,

Sky has pinned the forum. Testing for the last 10 months, but what ?

AlanS181824

BONDIred wrote: »

Called up yesterday to cancel Sky BB, guy in cancellations didnt even try to keep me as a customer.

Told them I was getting less than 2mb on sky, he said they cant offer me any more as 5mb is the max for my line.

Told him efibre was in my area and I was told speeds up to 70mb, gave me my UAN and said move to Eircom.

I asked about Sky fibre, and he said will defo not be this year and to come back to sky in about 12 months and check to see if Sky fibre is available.

Seriously!? This is how much Sky care for their customers? I expected a lot more from them.... Ridiculous carry on.

airuser

AlanS181824 wrote: »

Seriously!? This is how much Sky care for their customers? I expected a lot more from them.... Ridiculous carry on.

I say what is happening is that CS are getting p...... off with customers asking about Fibre that morale is poor and one is getting answers like that.

Yes, I would like fibre. If I could a little higher speed 12/15 M would be happy.

Have checked with Eircom with out vectoring max is about 40M on my line.

Anyway the deal I have with Sky will keep me there for a few months more. Tings might change!!!!!!!!!

SpaceTime

It wouldn't make any sense for them to sell off their customer base as they have all the CS infrastructure in place for television services anyway.

It just seems really strange to have spent so much money on the glitzy launch and then just pick the obsolete technology that's just on its last legs.

15 other companies are using Eircom Wholesale's cabinet infrastructure at the moment so, it's not like eircom are being difficult to deal with or something. In fact, they're really pushing the idea that it's an open platform.

Also, the eircom FTTC technology appears to be working exceptionally well. It's actually outperforming many people's expectations and the vectoring solution has pushed some people up to 100Mbit/s and most to over 70.

SpaceTime

airuser wrote: »

Have checked with Eircom with out vectoring max is about 40M on my line.

All cabinets will have vectoring enabled within a few days. It's just a remote software update for the cabinet so there's no major work involved. I think they'r just doing it on a phased basis to avoid disruption on the off chance that an update went wrong.

New cabinets installed from this point on will have vectoring enabled from the word go too.

Also, vectoring's not an add-on or extra service. Once the cabinet's enabled, all connected lines have to get it.

The equipment they're using has had vectoring planned in from day one.

Also, it's available to all companies using the NGA (Next Generation Access) product, not just eircom.

AlanS181824

airuser wrote: »

I say what is happening is that CS are getting p...... off with customers asking about Fibre that morale is poor and one is getting answers like that.

Yes, I would like fibre. If I could a little higher speed 12/15 M would be happy.

Have checked with Eircom with out vectoring max is about 40M on my line.

Anyway the deal I have with Sky will keep me there for a few months more. Tings might change!!!!!!!!!

I can get "up to" 70Mb, hopefully that'll be the case when I order Vodafone.
Fed up waiting at this stage.

airuser

Sky would sell off the "Talk" side of the company. Sky Satellite is a nice earner for them here. They are getting a better price for their products here than over the pond.

We all the ISP offering Fibre and UPC offering even higher speeds. One wonders what SKY are up to.

They are certainly lagging behind.

The infrastructure and exchanges are Eircom. Some of the exchanges have BT equipment installed. Sky has to deal with Eircom.

Eircom is vectoring in some areas.

SpaceTime

airuser wrote: »

Sky would sell off the "Talk" side of the company. Sky Satellite is a nice earner for them here. They are getting a better price for their products here than over the pond.

We all the ISP offering Fibre and UPC offering even higher speeds. One wonders what SKY are up to.

They are certainly lagging behind.

The infrastructure and exchanges are Eircom. Some of the exchanges have BT equipment installed. Sky has to deal with Eircom.

Eircom is vectoring in some areas.

Vectoring is being rolled out in *ALL* areas. It's just a phased software update and will be 100% complete very soon. It was part of the specification for the Huawei VDSL2 cabinets they're using and the service specification for modems used by any ISP that's using the service.

Each night for the last couple of weeks, a group of cabinets gets remotely updated with new firmware. That's pretty much all that's required.

Vodafone also had to update its modems (they can push software updates out to them). Other ISPs modems were already vectoring-ready.

The technology allows the DSLAM (the equipment your modem is talking to that is located in the cabinet) to monitor every line connected to it and actively manage crosstalk between lines and interference. It's a little bit like the kind of technology used in noise cancelling headphones. You inject a signal into each line that is matched to the interference and cancels it out, thus cleaning up the line and allowing faster speeds.

Basically, what happens with BT and other companies that have equipment in the exchanges now is that they can use it as a handover point to take traffic back from the fibre cabinets into their own core networks.

So, BT still gets quite a bit of 'bang for its buck' out of the unbundling process anyway.

All the fibre connections to the local cabinets come back to equipment in each exchange and are fed into a big router which connects them to the core network. That system can also pass the data over to other operators' core networks which is how it will work for Vodafone, Sky etc etc. The more nodes they have, the less they have to spend by renting capacity from eircom.

The other interesting bit is that every modem used on this system contains a VoIP adaptor and has two analogue telephone ports on the back. So, you can actually provide voice services over the fibre network without using the local exchange at all. This is already being done by Digiweb for example and it potentially saves them quite a bit of money as they don't have to use eircom's voice network at all.

So, the current Sky Hub would not meet the eircom spec as it lacks VoIP capability and it may also lack vectoring capability. In the UK, BT Open provided separate modems and then the ISP had to plug their own 'hub' into the back of that modem. In Ireland, eircom just provides a minimum specification which must be complied with an it's up to the companies to provide their own modems.

Also, eircom insists on an engineer installation as they need to ensure there's a splitter socket installed and that the internal wiring is checked. That's not the case in the UK anymore and I have a feeling it may lead to big problems with higher speeds over there. VDSL is *VERY* fussy about bad wiring.

airuser

SpaceTime
Thanks for the info. Getting to understand more about the new set ups. Great to have some one explain things.

So what in the h... Are SKY waiting for ?

Have seen the Eircom modem in a friends home recently nice job. His faceplate and mine are the same.

Please SKY hurry up

SpaceTime

Nobody other than Sky management could answer that question!

airuser

SpaceTime wrote: »

Nobody other than Sky management could answer that question!

When and what SKY. have to leave it at that.

degsie

airuser wrote: »

When and what SKY. have to leave it at that.

Makes sense.

BONDIred

AlanS181824 wrote: »

Seriously!? This is how much Sky care for their customers? I expected a lot more from them.... Ridiculous carry on.

Yeah I was a bit shocked, i prob would have stayed a bit longer if they offered me a discount/incentive!

Guy asked me how long I was with Sky BB, told him 12 months, and he said why did I stay so ling with the poor speeds.....In contract...couldnt move!

Maybe it was his first day!

Nonoperational

It's an absolute disaster to be honest. The attitude to it is worse. Constantly fobbing customers off with nonsense about "testing" and pushing the date out further and further when they clearly are just picking dates out of the air to keep people happy.

It seems they are after the low hanging fruit, people who don't know/care about speeds. I'd imagine it may be to do with the requirement to provide vectoring and VOIP compliant modems and engineer installs. At the moment we are just an extension of the UK broadband operation. Send out a Sky hub and that's that.

Sky contacted boards a few months ago and provided a statement which was again a load of crap. They obviously don't like people talking about it. I left their broadband service a few months ago for Vodafone and would highly recommend anyone else that's on the fence to do it if fibre is available to you.

Kenny Logins

I don't see the big deal TBH, why not just go with Vodafone or Eircom? Vote with your feet.

Nonoperational

Kenny Logins wrote: »

I don't see the big deal TBH, why not just go with Vodafone or Eircom? Vote with your feet.

That's what people are doing, but there's a year contract with Sky and it would be nice to get some sort of deal with TV and BB.

SpaceTime

You've load of options:

Eircom, Vodafone, Digiweb, UTV Connect and Magnet.