Skytel - Not Ready For Prime Time?

[ei2jp]

Colleagues,

I'm going to preface this by trying NOT to get emotional about what's become a very emotional subject for me. Here's the facts..

1) In mid-April I signed up for SkyTel 2Mbit wireless broadband out of Rosslare Harbour. After a month+ of battles to get the original installation working, a second installation finally resulted in upload/download speeds of approx. 700kbits.

2) Thinking this was a bit low I spoke to Garrett at Skytel about this; He said that there were 12 others on my VLAN and that it was due to contention. As I mentioned to him this occurred at 8am or 8pm, didn't seem to matter what time of day it was. He then "tweaked" my connection and IMMEDIATELY I was getting upload and download speeds of 1MBit and the response to the web was, well, fantastic.

3) Around the 15th of June, my speeds (both directions) dropped back to 700kBit. I didn't really notice it that much but I did notice that I was starting to get DNS timeouts and also timeouts on well-known web pages (CNN, eBay, Google, etc..). I also noticed that my IMAP mail client was starting to report "connection lost" to my mail server in Dallas, Texas, USA.

4) In the last week, the DNS timeouts got so bad that I had to switch from Skytels DNS server to the DNS servers at opendns.org, which solved the DNS timeout issues. Then things just got worse..

5) iChat started timing out with a colleague in Cork on a regular basis. Got so bad two days ago that we had to go back to ordinary twisted pair for our conference. Web pages started reporting that the server was'nt responding, etc.. etc..

6) So, I decided to run a ping every 10 seconds to my VLAN gateway (remember this is within SkyTels network, presumably) and to a well-known nameserver at esat.net:

ping stopped: 2007-06-27 12:14

--- 192.111.39.1 ping statistics ---
1368 packets transmitted, 1220 packets received, 10% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 33.890/3031.659/51300.650/7459.300 ms

--- 89.167.147.254 ping statistics ---
439 packets transmitted, 418 packets received, +1 duplicates, 4% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.663/3417.450/50207.809/8275.451 ms
[Ron-Hahns-MacBook-Pro:~] ronhahn%

ping stopped: 2007-06-27 15:16

--- 192.111.39.1 ping statistics ---
1089 packets transmitted, 936 packets received, +1 duplicates, 14%
packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 34.464/3057.057/93985.218/7452.179 ms

--- 89.167.147.254 ping statistics ---
1089 packets transmitted, 944 packets received, 13% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.564/3226.139/53168.316/7196.574 ms
[Ron-Hahns-MacBook-Pro:~] ronhahn%

As you can see from the stats above there was a whopping 13% packet loss in the early afternoon to MY OWN GATEWAY!!!

I then spoke to Michael (Garrett was presumably unavailable) and again, the same old story about "contention" blah blah blah and that everything looked "normal" from their side. Is this normal???

Now I fully accept that there is going to be some slow downs over the summer months with all the kiddies file sharing etc.. but honestly, 13% packet loss and round-trip ping times of 53 seconds is, in my opinion, a VERY underperforming network.

Oh, and Michael promised to phone back yesterday morning and I've yet to hear from Skytel yet.

I have a few beefs over all of this:

1) How can an ISP claim 2MBit symmetric connections when the link speed is clearly 700kBit?? I wonder if this is worthy of a complaint to the Dept. of Consumer Affairs or perhaps the Advertising Standards Authority.

2) I've been working with IP networks since the early days of the Internet and never have I seen a properly operating network return ping times of anything like 50 seconds even with heavy congestion.

3) The 13% packet loss looks like, to me, that intermediate routers are dropping 13% of my packets "on the floor" as they are never reaching my default gateway on my subnet. This would tend to suggest a very overloaded infrastructure.

The performance in the afternoon has gotten so bad that I cannot

a) Reliably send emails to my outgoing SMTP server. Sometimes it takes 2 or 3 tries to send a mail

b) Use iChat (about 10kbits bandwidth) for conferencing because of repeated timeouts (most times of the day).

c) Download large software updates (>5-10MB) as the connections time out along the way.

Is this really worth all the agro and should I wait or dump them now?

Suggestions?

Ron

[Trigger]

I don't think I can help you much but you could look at Permanet. Although you,ve probably already had a look at them. Are you sure you can leave now? Isn't it a contract you have to sign when you sign up for them so you have to wait for the contract to finish?

[ei2jp]

Originally Posted by Trigger

I don't think I can help you much but you could look at Permanet. Although you,ve probably already had a look at them. Are you sure you can leave now? Isn't it a contract you have to sign when you sign up for them so you have to wait for the contract to finish?

Latest Update:

Got a call from Michael McCarthy this morning stating they were going to have a look at the Rosslare Harbour base station and to continue to run ping tests throughout the day. Latest results say it all:

--- skytel-gateway2.kerry.com ping statistics ---
1424 packets transmitted, 1202 packets received, +1 duplicates, 15% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.477/4108.169/64242.778/9422.555 ms
[Ron-Hahns-MacBook-Pro:~] ronhahn% date
Fri Jun 29 21:34:23 IST 2007

So it looks like nothing was fixed today..

I have standardised on running a ping to my default router every ten seconds and, overall, mornings are slightly better than afternoons/evenings but still the packet loss is unacceptably high.

I'm giving them another week to sort things then I'm going elsewhere..

I don't think the contract is an issue because the ONLY thing I signed was a direct debit mandate. Given the stink I've put up so far they may be glad to be rid of me??

[lochdara]

Hi there.... I am also a sktel customer with contract due to expire. My download manager tells me I am getting as low as 1 kb/s over the last few months. Also ebay, and other well known sites dont work very well. I have to reboot my whole system including antenna most days, hence my router is beside my pc. Even if i plug the cable direct into my pc its no better so its not a router issue. I was lucky last night it went upto 100 kb/s for a few mins and fell back to 10 kb/s.
And when i do plug directly into my own pc i see half a dozen or more pcs from other customers... I guess skytel never told them about the security risks of joining them....

I had arguments at the start.. DHCP would drop my connection every 30 mins. In the end they gave me a static line which helped for a while pretty good...as i said for a while....

I then advised everyone who had to join skytel to look for a static ip free before signing... They are also having the same crap...
and as for ping.. i dont get too many replies back under 1000ms.....

Stats are here:
Date Download Speed Upload Speed Qos RTT Maxpause
29/06/2007 22:21 62 kbps (8 KB/s) 60 kbps (8 KB/s) 20 % 918 ms 1308 ms
29/06/2007 224 127 kbps (16 KB/s) 52 kbps (7 KB/s) 43 % 895 ms 829 ms
27/06/2007 17:46 73 kbps (9 KB/s) 247 kbps (31 KB/s) 2 % 40 ms 765 ms
27/06/2007 17:43 743 kbps (91 KB/s) 387 kbps (48 KB/s) 7 % 283 ms 646 ms
26/06/2007 22:39 28 kbps (4 KB/s) 209 kbps (26 KB/s) 4 % 307 ms 2920 ms
26/06/2007 21:19 3 kbps (1 KB/s) 24 kbps (3 KB/s) 6 % 1204 ms 17703 ms
26/06/2007 21:16 10 kbps (2 KB/s) 0 kbps (0 KB/s) 8 % 1365 ms 4790 ms
26/06/2007 20:42 136 kbps (17 KB/s) 82 kbps (10 KB/s) 3 % 55 ms 2110 ms
26/06/2007 20:41 450 kbps (55 KB/s) 300 kbps (37 KB/s) 27 % 54 ms 726 ms

Total Averages:
181 kbps (23 KB/s) 151kbps (19KB/s) 14 % 569 ms 3533 ms

For a test i am going to run a night or 2 on 3's usb modem.... They give 3.6mb for €19.99 with 10gig download!!!!.

We shall wait and see....

All skytel customers should post in here.

[Trigger]

I tend to suffer from sudden disconnects for some reason don't know why? Apart from that the highest I,ve gotten when downloading is around 200kbps when I was using a download manager with a download accelerator. I really don't trust the tests on this website either aswell as it says I'm getting around 2mbps but I'm on a 1mb connection, and I never get to even 1mbs when downloading.

[Daragh_OBrien]

I've had similar problems with Skytel. Sudden disconnects, upload and download speeds that are well below the advertised rate (even allowing for contention). I finally got an acceptance that all is not right with my installation about 2 weeks ago and am waiting on a techie to come out and redo the install.

Bad weather has interfered with that but if new installs are being prioritised over making sure that existing customers are actually set up correctly and are working then the business model isn't going to hold up as one p***ed off customer will tell at least 10 others (or post about it to an even bigger audience).

Furthermore, I've noticed that they seem to have sneakily upped the price. I signed up for the 2mb package which is advertised at €59. Checking my bank statements I've noticed them taking over €70 a time from me. This equates to the €59 plus the VAT on top of that.

If I was a business this would make sense but I'm not. As a consumer the price advertised to me should include VAT (this is covered under the VAT acts, various pieces of Consumer legislation and the Distance Selling Regulations). Their flyers do not flag that these prices are vat exclusive, and as the adverts are directed at consumers (households) the price advertised should be the vat INCLUSIVE price.

Given that I specifically queried this with them before signing up and was told that I'd be paying €59 I'm doubly pissed off that I'm paying the guts of €100 for a service that is as patchy as hell.

i'm considering asking for a refund on the service under the Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act given the piddle poor quality of the service, in particular as the big thing preventing me switching to another wireless provider is having to shell out another installation charge... it would be my 3rd one in 2 years.

eircom are scheduled to be upgrading castlebridge exchange in the next few months so I'll be considering a switch. In the meantime I'll probably take a butchers at the 3 service as we have limited 3G coverage in Castlebridge...

[ei2jp]

Ok Lads,

I'm going to try to be fair and impartial on this post.

The last few days have brought some significant improvements in my SkyTel 2Mbit service:

Date Download Speed Upload Speed Qos RTT Maxpause
05/07/2007 1243 1414 kbps (173 KB/s) 1122 kbps (137 KB/s) 90 % 39 ms 153 ms
02/07/2007 1254 570 kbps (70 KB/s) 1227 kbps (150 KB/s) 41 % 38 ms 625 ms
02/07/2007 1253 743 kbps (91 KB/s) 1303 kbps (159 KB/s) 23 % 36 ms 545 ms
28/06/2007 0858 719 kbps (88 KB/s) 708 kbps (87 KB/s) 98 % 39 ms 122 ms
27/06/2007 0825 710 kbps (87 KB/s) 146 kbps (18 KB/s) 95 % 34 ms 242 ms
26/06/2007 1648 329 kbps (41 KB/s) 713 kbps (87 KB/s) 0 % 36 ms 4009 ms
26/06/2007 1631 529 kbps (65 KB/s) 703 kbps (86 KB/s) 30 % 38 ms 871 ms
26/06/2007 0822 706 kbps (87 KB/s) 670 kbps (82 KB/s) 93 % 36 ms 286 ms
25/06/2007 0819 596 kbps (73 KB/s) 670 kbps (82 KB/s) 35 % 37 ms 663 ms
25/06/2007 0810 721 kbps (88 KB/s) 709 kbps (87 KB/s) 99 % 33 ms 47 ms

Total Averages:
704 kbps (86 KB/s) 797kbps (98KB/s) 61 % 37 ms 757 ms

As you can see my QOS has improved significantly and my download speed has pipped around 1.4Mbits. This is the best I've ever seen since I joined Skytel.

After a LOT of back-and-forth with Michael and Garret (techies) they finally admitted that 15% packet loss was "not good" and agreed to look into it last weekend.

On Monday morning, I started my day to 1% average packet loss and a considerable improvement in the overall responsiveness of the network. Things didn't break for a change!

My upload/download speeds were still at 700kbits or thereabouts, though. This was not unexpected. I've had a long-running complaint about their blanket "contention is the cause of all woes" opinion when the issue of upload/download speeds comes into play. Michael agreed that given the various times of day that I ran the speed test that it probably wasn't contention. No surprise to me. He also admitted that it wasn't an issue with the backhaul because the fibre connection to the Rosslare Harbour base station had "plenty of capacity". This infers that they have LOTS of bandwidth to each base station..

Today as you will note I'm getting twice the speed I got just a few days ago. This would suggest that the link speed is settable by SkyTel network ops and they can raise/lower it at will. I also realise that these speeds are coming in on a rainy day, during teenager waking hours, and I had expected a lot less, to be honest.

I think the SkyTel advert is miss-leading; If others feel the same I suggest making a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (The Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland :: Make a complaint) via their on-line form. If everyone starts complaining about these miss-leading ads then ALL the ISPs will have to start publishing more realistic speeds on their adverts. And, you might even get your problem fixed!

[Trigger]

Sorry for my language but mine is still as ****e as ever.

[ei2jp]

Originally Posted by Trigger

Sorry for my language but mine is still as ****e as ever.

Well, what's worked for me is:

1) I've collected good data, which is hard to dispute.

2) I've presented the evidence to SkyTel and let them make the decisions.

3) I've given credit where credit was due.

4) I've persisted in seeing the problems through to resolution.

Now this approach might not work for everyone but, in my view, when presented with irrefutable evidence its hard to argue..

And, I forgot to mention that I had a deadline in mind for the resolution of the problems. In my case, I _did_ have the option of Eircom DSL as a backup if things went wrong.. Or Permanet.. I would have voted with my feet if it came to that.

Not sure where you're located but I would be happy to look at your connection's performance (or lack thereof) and collect the same evidence that I did. Or, I can tell you how to do it and you can collect the data yourself.

Regards,

Ron

[Trigger]

Summary Last 10 Results:
Date Download Speed Upload Speed Qos RTT Maxpause
06/07/2007 13:38 33 kbps (5 KB/s) 0 kbps (0 KB/s) 22 % 100 ms 1750 ms
03/07/2007 15:19 18 kbps (3 KB/s) 151 kbps (19 KB/s) 69 % 164 ms 1531 ms
03/07/2007 05;09 502 kbps (62 KB/s) 329 kbps (41 KB/s) 19 % 480 ms 1189 ms
02/07/2007 19:58 46 kbps (6 KB/s) 154 kbps (19 KB/s) 29 % 252 ms 1750 ms
01/07/2007 19:20 38 kbps (5 KB/s) 0 kbps (0 KB/s) 4 % 717 ms 1641 ms
25/06/2007 20:41 205 kbps (25 KB/s) 135 kbps (17 KB/s) 6 % 162 ms 852 ms
22/06/2007 16:15 35 kbps (5 KB/s) 240 kbps (30 KB/s) 23 % 176 ms 3719 ms
16/06/2007 12:16 573 kbps (70 KB/s) 370 kbps (46 KB/s) 7 % 90 ms 657 ms
15/06/2007 19:43 1490 kbps (182 KB/s) 124 kbps (16 KB/s) 52 % 38 ms 523 ms
11/06/2007 20:27 1081 kbps (132 KB/s) 609 kbps (75 KB/s) 12 % 157 ms 758 ms

Total Averages:
402 kbps (50 KB/s) 211kbps (26KB/s) 25 % 234 ms 1437 ms

Is this the data you're needing?

[ps200306]

I will try to post just the plain facts of the matter here.

I signed up to Skytel's 2Mb SOHO package in March 2008. From the outset, the connection speed was only a fraction of the advertised rate. I ran a large number of speed tests (Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test) and although the speed was variable (and the service frequently completely unavailable), the max download speeds converged very precisely around 720Kb/s which looked very suspicious. Upload speeds were much more variable, sometime only a couple of dozen kb/s.

After about 3 weeks I had collected enough evidence to get back to Skytel with a complaint. They suggested my dish might be misaligned and said they would send an engineer. After no engineer arrived on either of two days mentioned, and after they had not even got back to me to discuss as promised after five days, I took the liberty of cancelling their direct debit (they had just sent me my first invoice). That seemed to get their attention -- a few days later my first call from them was to ask about the money! I explained to them the service was not working and I would be happy to pay when I got what I was paying for. There was no feedback for another week when suddenly I got a call to say the unit on the outside of the house had been replaced. At the same time I got a call from "Garrett" mentioning the direct debit cancellation and wanting "to know how we were going to move the situation forward". Given that I was asking *them* to make the service work, I thought *he* should be answering that.

Fortunately I had a few hours to test performance between when the unit had been replaced and when I spoke to Garrett on the phone, so I knew that nothing at all had changed -- it was still slow and intermittent. During the course of our conversation he happened to mention that the units were installed at some default settings and had to be set to tweaked by Skytel after installation. "Mysteriously" after that phone conversation the max speed suddenly changed dramatically so that I was within a whisker of 2Mb down *and* 2Mb up. I happen to have a neighbour with exactly the same experience -- it was only after I suggested he ask for the speed to be turned up that it started working for the first time in two months! This seems to match the experience of some others posting here. I would advise all Skytel users with speeds consistently below nominal at all times of day and night to check with Skytel that they have been "tweaked".

Anyway, this phone conversation happened on a Friday, and Garrett was insistent that by Monday I had to decide whether I was going to pay them or dispense with their service. So I ran lots more tests. (I do regular speed tests, and also have a one second ping against one of their DNS servers running continuously for almost two months now). The speed and latency, when working, were now fantastic. Unfortunately, there were still outages of at least an hour a day where the connection would stop working altogether. On the Monday I got a call from Skytel wanting to know if I was going to pay them. I told them that the service still wasn't working. They said they would get back to me, and a short while later they rang back and claimed that "during those outages my unit was trying to associate with a base station in Curracloe and they had now locked me to the base station in Rosslare" so the problems would not recur. At this point, they wanted me to not only renew my direct debit, but to give them a Laser card as a guarantee of payment. Since I believed their spiel about the patchy connection, I obliged, although I told them I did not expect to be billed for the first month of usage when it wasn't working and they agreed.

I would like to say that was the end of the problems, but that is far from true. There continue to be outages of varying duration. Outages of at least one hour duration occur more or less daily and there are shorter outages more frequently. During outages the antenna unit shows a red light indicating an inability to associate with a base station which I do not know whether to interpret as an IP network problem, or something more "physical". I have lost confidence in Skytel's ability or willingness to correct the problem. To add insult to injury they *did* bill me for the first month when they said they wouldn't. To be honest I don't really care about the money -- I just want a reliable connection.

So, my overall impression -- the service works really well WHEN IT'S WORKING. Latency is low and I get great VPN and VoIP performance. Compared to the Digiweb satellite service I am trying to replace, it's like coming out of the stone age. But there continues to be serious problems and I cannot rely on it as my only connection to the outside world, which means additional expense. It's a pity because if it was more reliable I would never consider moving. As it is, I look forward to the ADSL-ising of the Blackwater exchange sometime next year to open up other options. I have found Skytel's customer service to be both inept and pushy.

[dickiesam]

Thankfully, having read the previous posts, I am not with SkyTel. Just putting in my oar for what it's worth to say that if SkyTel are openly advertising service costs that are VAT exclusive, Even if they talk about VAT in their very small print, they are in breach of a number of regulations. Give the Revenue Commissioner's hotline a call with the details. They will be delighted to hear from you.
Dickiesam

[ps200306]

Originally Posted by dickiesam

...if SkyTel are openly advertising service costs that are VAT exclusive, Even if they talk about VAT in their very small print, they are in breach of a number of regulations...

I know another poster mentioned it, but my experience is that there is no additional VAT on the invoices. In fact the line item, for some reason, is "SOHO with no VAT". I checked Skytel's website again after reading the other poster's comment and there is no mention of VAT, but in fairness to them they are charging exactly what they advertise. Now if only the connection was a bit more stable... I've even resorted to correlating my ping tests against Wexford coastal station visibility reports to see if I could implicate *fog*, but that seems to have just been a fluke the last couple of times I've had problems!