Year 1 of Fibre Broadband Performance Measurement

Here are the results of the first year's performance measurement using a SamKnows "Whitebox"on a Sky Fibre Unlimited VDSL2 (FTTC) broadband connection.

Analysis of the Monthly Report Card results from SamKnows gives the average download throughput as 37.67Mbps.

Analysis of the Monthly Report Card results from SamKnows gives the average upload throughput as 9.12Mbps.

One Year on Sky Fibre

At 7:52 AM on Friday 13 April 2012, I placed my order to upgrade my broadband service to the long awaited and newly launched Sky Fibre Broadband. Not a bad Friday the Thirteenth.

Two weeks later, on 27 April 2012, an Openreach engineer phoned me from the street cabinet to say he was about to connect my line to the fibre cabinet. Ten minutes later, he turned up to install a vDSL faceplate on the master phone socket and fix the Openreach fibre modem (the Huawei HG612) to the wall.

We chatted and had a cup of tea while he worked. Finally he ran some tests and showed me the results on his gizmo (JDSU). “Should be good for about 70Mbps max” he said. He waited while I connected the Sky router and got online, and he insisted on seeing the result of a speed test. About 36Mbps. Bit of a speed bump from the 3.5Mbps download speed on ADSL. Wowwww!

Wind forward to today - one year later. What has it been like to have a “superfast” broadband connection?

The obvious thing is that file downloads, software upgrades, movie rentals and Catch Up TV all download much faster. No more buffering - movies and on demand viewing is ready to watch almost immediately.

Upload is much faster too. Sky Fibre began as a “40/2” service, providing an up to 2Mbps upload speed. After a few weeks was upgraded to a “40/10” service, giving an up to 10Mbps upload speed. Sharing files and documents to “cloud” based services is now much more feasible.

Reliability has been excellent, throughput speed has been steady. To date, I have not been affected by the two major issues that have been hot topics on the Sky Help Forum: the “half-speed”/slow throughput problem that has been affecting some fibre users, and backhaul network congestion (which has been a problem for both fibre and ADSL users at some exchanges).

What about the future outlook for Sky Fibre?

Hopefully:

• Successful completion of the fix rollout for he “half-speed”/slow throughput problem.
• Faster resolution of backhaul network congestion problems.
• A product/price restructuring to match Sky’s popular competitors.

Happy 1st Birthday to Sky Fibre.

Reporting payroll information to HMRC in real time

From 6 April 2013, employers will have to start reporting PAYE information to HMRC in real time. You may see this referred to as Real Time Information - or RTI.

This means that employers (or their accountant, bookkeeper or payroll bureau) will have to:

• send details to HMRC every time they pay an employee, at the time they pay them.

• use payroll software to send this information electronically as part of their routine payroll process.

Is your business ready yet?

We have chosen Moneysoft as our payroll software provider and we have been using Payroll Manager 20 to process our payroll for a while now. It's easy to use and it's RTI compliant.

RTI Payroll Software from Moneysoft.

Sky Broadband Unlimited Fibre

I'm sure you will be pleased to hear that, on 31 January 2012, Sky finally announced the launch of a fibre broadband product.

http://corporate.sky.com/media/press_releases/2012/sky_builds_on_broadband_growth_with_increased_coverage_10000_wifi_hotspots_and_new_fibre_launch

The fibre broadband product launches in April, but Sky has already started contacting some customers (who have previously pre-registered an interest) to invite them to join a final trial. A few people are already connected and reporting massive speed improvement.

Obviously I am very keen to upgrade our internet connection to this product! I have pre-registered (both last year and this year) but I haven't heard anything yet. If they ever do call before the product launch, I will accept immediately. Otherwise, it's a case of waiting. In any case, hopefully by this summer, we will have a much faster internet connection.

Super-fast fibre broadband has been available where we live for at least a year now, but I have resisted changing to a different provider - mainly because initially it was quite expensive, but also because other providers restrict their service in many ways.

I'm quite keen to stay with Sky because their internet service is truly unlimited - both in terms of monthly usage and (allegedly) traffic management that can affect the speed of different types of traffic at certain times of day.

RIP TiVo UK Series 1

After almost 9 years of excellent service, we are retiring our TiVo UK Series 1 DVRs from active recording (there's still a backlog of unwatched TV so it will be a while before they are removed from the AV stacks).

TiVo service ceases in the UK on 1 June, so a couple of the latest Sky+HD (DRX-890C) DVRs have been installed in preparation for "the end of TiVo in the UK" and they take over active recording duty from today.

The Sky+HD EPG provides "Series Link" (but it's not an exact equivalent of TiVo's Season Pass) and there's no equivalent of TiVo's WishList facility. There is a facility to search the 7 day TV Guide in the Sky+HD EPG but Locate TV and myDigiguide will be providing some additional support to make sure that we get our own version of "Smart DVR, Brilliant TV".

What the Sky+HD lacks in sophistication when compared to the TiVo user interface is somewhat compensated by other useful features such as viewing and recording of HD channels (which have even better picture quality than that provided by the "Mode 0" hack), Remote Recording via an iPhone app and access to Sky Anytime+ downloads.

Gadget Show Live 2011

Another great "live" show today! And lots of interesting stuff to look at and play with, including NVIDIA demo of 3D gaming and a massive Sony 3D TV.

RIP iRobot Roomba 530

Sadly the iRobot Roomba 530 is now deceased. A victim of too much carpet dust and dog hairs. Despite "open Roomba surgery" to correct the problem (i.e.major dis-assembly and interior cleaning), the alleged problem persisted and could not be resolved. Mrs. S., therefore, has given it a final dis-assembly...