But at last an offer from Sky for existing customers to get Fibre half price, so I had to jump on this bandwagon immediately. The Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) service is a 40Mbps down and 10Mbps up with no download cap. Compared to before this is a huge improvement.

Router and Installation

With the new service comes a new router, again the network logon credentials are locked into the device but not an issue for me as it will be used as a modem only. For most however where this router will be the only networking hardware in the home, it may be an issue. The Sky SR102 is almost identical to the SR101 except for and updated modem to use VDSL and the black colour scheme, therefore like its predecessor the Ethernet has for dated  100Mbps ports, and the same single channel wireless N rated at 150Mbps. Wifi that picks the clearest wireless channel is included but this was made available to the SR101 via a software update.

Installation is very simple, online searches for fibre installations still favour early adopters who required a BT Openreach engineer visit to install an Openreach modem between the phone socket and Sky hub. Now it is as simple as just swapping micro filters and modems over.

The timeframe for switchover is a whole day in which at a time an engineer will access the green cabinet down the road and swap over the wires to the line, this takes seconds and after switchover the old ADSL router will still work, so if the drop in connection while the connection takes place is missed then it may not be noticed.

With the new router installed, the new speed is available immediately, with much less fluctuations that would be seen with ADSL while it’s in learning mode to obtain the fastest reliable connection.

Footnote

In my experience things did not go as smoothly as suggested. My connection dropped in the early afternoon for a minute and assuming the switchover took place swapped the modems over and took a gander at the router stats for the connection speed. The connection was half my ADSL equivalent with high attenuation and low SNR, then after work the connection was down.

A call to the customer support and a day offline waiting for an Openreach engineer to diagnose the loose wire in the street cabinet and reconnect.

I took delivery of a Netgear FVS318N router to replace a basic hub, installed it and did a bit of cable management which involved unplugging my Sagem F@st 2504 that I use as a modem.

However upon powering up the Sagem after tidying cables, it has no life, apart from this strange arrangement of light on the front:

I called Sky (my ISP) support who happily informed me that there is a common issue with the power supply to the Sagem router that caused them to fail. Wanting to get back on the net immediately and conversation about a replacement power supply giving vague delivery lead times, I opted to purchase the new Sky branded router (dubbed the Sky Hub):

The outage lasted 5 days as I waited for delivery of the new modem. An annoyance of this is that I had a spare, working ADSL modem but this could not be used as Sky does not give out the credentials to log on to their network, instead choosing to pre-load them on the modem before shipping.

Overall its an example of the unexpected issues that can arise when running a home server on a budget.

BOOTNOTE:

It has been mentioned in many Sky internet forums that using an unapproved Sky router, i.e. one not supplied by Sky, will be in breach of the Terms & Conditions. However whilst on the phone to Sky broadband technical support the representative told me that it was acceptable to use a 3rd party router if the user was confident and acknowledged that no support would be given unless a Sky provided router was used.

The case may be that you still need to hand over the cash to Sky for one of their routers and keep it to hand, but after that the choice is yours!