Sky is the limit?

Well after many trouble free years with Nildram, my better half finally persuaded me to move ADSL providers to Sky because she can get it for nowt! (i.e. the staff price). Frankly when comparing £26 per month for Nilly and £0 for Sky I could not justify not at least giving it a go.

So how is Sky ADSL? Actually its been pretty decent so far. Download speeds are right up there and the pings in games seem fine so where is the downside? Well, it turns out the downside comes as soon as you want to do stuff like bit torrent or any other popular p2p. At this point it all goes to hell frankly.

The connection we have is "Sky Connect" which basically means ADSL on BT's kit and not Sky's LLU'd stuff (which from what I have read is not a bad thing) and it has a 40GB download limit. What this also means is to reduce costs for Sky and ensures good performance for less bandwidth and there is a of a lot of packet shaping on the various p2p protocols and ports.

So is there a way round? Ohhhh yes I set up utorrent to force encryption and randomise the port (and accept "legacy" connections where required). With this work around in place my download speed jumped from 10kB/s to 300kB/s which was not as good as Nildram, but definitely acceptable.

So, so far this looks like not a bad move, but as with anything we'll see over time. One thing that was interesting... once I told Nildram I was leaving, my connection became the best it had ever been. Full speed with anything all the time like a limit had been removed. Funny how that happened as I left, almost like it was a plan to make their service look great so I'd move right back if I had any problems. Not that I would for one minute suggest this was the case... or maybe I just did.