Greedy Sky admits: We crippled broadband with TOO MANY users

[gem]

From The Register

Greedy Sky admits: We crippled broadband with TOO MANY users

Overloaded Unlimited package actually rather limited
By Anna Leach 22nd January 2013 12:43 GMT
Sky has confessed it has overloaded its broadband service by putting far too many Brits onto its network. The media giant told The Register that it has run out of capacity in certain corners of the UK, which has knackered its users' internet connectivity at peak times.
Subscribers to Sky Broadband Unlimited in Doncaster, North Wales and Bristol have complained of connections grinding to a halt especially in the past three months. This is despite the company promising "we'll never slow your Unlimited broadband down, even at peak times".
One user of the ADSL service [1] went public to report that his or her download speeds dropped to 2Mbps:

I have had around nine months of continuous good service. Since the end of November I have had this dramatic speed loss during peak periods. This can drop from the usual 13-14Mbps download to as low as 2Mbps.

Others posted screenshots of broadband speed readings showing even worse drop-offs. This guy [2] was bumped to a download speed of 0.8Mbps from an off-peak speed of 16.8Mbps.
One particularly frustrated customer in Doncaster [3] had this to say:

Internet is completely unusable, so this is the THIRD night in a row that I am unable to fulfil my contractually obligated working from home via the internet, so a third night's overtime lost. Not only is this a pain, it's actually losing me wages.

Stressing that the network freeze has only hit certain bits of its British network, a spokesperson from Sky gave us this statement:

Following a combination of an underlining increase in network traffic as well as an especially high rate of new customer additions, we are aware of capacity issues in a limited number of exchanges.

The company has promised to build in extra capacity at choked-up phone-line exchanges: "We are aware of the issue and are adding new capacity to those exchanges as soon as we can. We apologise to all customers who have been impacted by this issue."
Folks can check if their nearby exchange is affected by the cock-up, and when the media giant (2012 profit: £970m) plans to upgrade its capacity, on theservicestatus.sky.com [4] website. ®

[silver]

I wonder how long the issue has existed before they admitted there was an issue,. still at least they say they will fix it which is more than some companies in similar situations might do

[silver]

I wonder when this type of thing will play out in the 4g space, at the moment it's amazingly expensive for wireless data but in a few years there might be competition and realistic pricing - one can hope!

[greatlover]

silver matey. SKY offers much but delivers very little for it's price. I used to pay something like £60 a month, but for what? endless repeats. 20 minutes of every hour wasted on time filling adverts/trailers. Broadband hit or miss. I am now with BT Infinity, I have Vision plus and Lovefilm and many other channels, and it still costs me less than half I used to pay for SKY TV. You have the internet, use it. SKY is not the only choice out there.

[Stalybridgelass]

I totally agree and have ditched Sky in favour of a samsung dvd player picked up for £40 with internet wifi, a bt subscribtion and lovefilm bundle - saved myself £600 a year!