i signed up for sky broadband swapping from AOL, AOIL was a good service but decided to introduce a fup which was only 60gig per month so i went looking for a new isp and found sky. I believe sky's fup is around 100 gig or so, i aslo save £15 per month with sky and the Broadband is twice as fast.

I'm on the Broadband max 16Mb/s i was at first a little bit unsure about sky because of all the negative remarks in the forum thinking i might of made a huge mistake, i was unsure what speed i would get from sky when i was told i could get from 8 to 16 Mb/s.

i was told i would be live on the 17/07/07 and guess what on the 17th i could connect no problems with a download speed test of 13.6 Mb/s great i thought but then during the day for some strange reason i had to reboot the router about 5 time or more, this was getting annoying i called sky and 1 guy told me it was my extention cable which when i tested the main socket there was no difference in noise or line attenuation at all so i was a bit confused but i still did has he suggested and it didn't work.

i called sky again and another guy told me that my line could not support the faster speed and if i wanted to he could cap me to 8 meg i said not a chance i don't think it is my end i think it is yours, i told him i am 850 meters from the exchange as the crow flies my Line Attenuation is 20.0 db  and noise marging is 7.4 db downstream my upstream is line = 11 db and noise = 11.5 db, baring in mind i thought he was a tech support i asked him if they was OK for ADSL2+ he replied with i don't know.

now i am getting realy annoyed so i suggested that he put me on to some proper tech person who actually knows what they are talking about and not reading from a slip of paper in front of them, i was put on to a female who asked me the same questions all over again then surpised me and asked me my router status with the line attenuation and noise margin she even told me how to do it, now i was a bit more happy as she sounded like she knew what she was talking about.

after telling her all my router stats she said oops hang on a minute you only actually go live proper on the 20th, i replied but my letter says the 17th and i connected on the 17th, she replied yes i know but we are still testing your line which sometimes causes drop outs like your getting my advice is after the 20th if it still drops leave it for a couple of days then call us back.

on the 20th i kept a close eye on my connection and its been up since with not 1 drop out i stll connect at 16.3Mb/s and download test at 13.6 Mb/s.

my conclusion about sky is that it is a good service i get what they said i would get , tech help has a couple of people who knows what they are talking about and a few that don't, even though on the 17th with the drop outs in the evening it was great with not one drop out i would certainly recomend sky to a friend even though it took 3 days after my connection activation to be up and running proper.

the downside of sky.... you don't get any web space :(  AOL has not deleted my old web site yet which is a good thing up to now ).

msn sometimes won't let you log in " a simple reboot of router fixes that "

they are the only real downsides i have found.

the plus side

i get 16Mb/s broadband and 2 extra tv packages and still save £15 per month

i can browse faster while downloading / uploading and also play online games while downloading and uploading my download is 13.6 Mb/s from 7.3 Mb/s and my upload is 800Kb/s "peak" from 430Kb/s

they are the good points.

a couple more bad points are

Tech support can be a pain but as i found out if you get the right person it helps a lot.

the router has your user info inbedded in the bios chip so u can't use another router if you don't know how to get the inbedded info.

i hope that others get lucky like me on this connection i find no problems with it now apart from the msn connection issue which after research i found its an ip issue with sky and msn so a simple reboot fixes it if this issue occurs.

i hope you found this usefull if you are having connection drops like i had my advice is give it at least 5 days before you call tech support and see if it resolves itself if not then give tech a call.