5 ways to reduce advertising network latency

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 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 was bumped to a download speed of 0.8Mbps from an off-peak speed of 16.8Mbps.

One particularly frustrated customer in Doncaster 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 the servicestatus.sky.com website. ®

5 ways to reduce advertising network latency