End of Daylight Saving Time Negates Sky UK VoIP Timing Bug

The change to Daylight Saving Time (DST) on Sunday, which saw clocks go back by 1 hour, has given some customers of UK ISP Sky Broadband – specifically a few of those with a VoIP based Sky Talk service and the SR203/204 (Sky Hub) router, a reprieve from an otherwise on-going timing bug.

As we reported in August (here), newer Sky Broadband customers are now often being provided with a SOGEA (via FTTC or G.fast) or FTTP based broadband connection. In this setup the phone service is handled via VoIP and thus your handset must be plugged directly into the router.

However, one of Sky’s past firmware updates to their Sky Hub introduced a new bug that can result in the customer’s handset reporting Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) rather than British Summer Time (BST). In other words, this created a 1-hour time difference between the network and handset, which among other things can occasionally result in some calls failing to connect.

A firmware fix for this bug was originally expected to be rolled out by the end of September, but that never happened and it’s currently listed as “TBC” (To Be Confirmed). However, Sunday’s change back to GMT means that Sky’s customers should be finding that they can move their phone handsets back to pulling the time and date via Caller ID, thus the correct time will now be registered (two people have so far reported that this works).

Admittedly this is not a permanent solution, but it does give Sky a little longer to resolve the underlying issue, at least until 28th March 2021 when the clocks will once again jump forward by 1 hour. Lest we forget that the ISP also has some WiFi and DHCP bugs to fix with their router(s) too (here).

We should point out that annoying router bugs can happen on any ISP from time to time, much as we’ve seen from BT and Virgin Media in the recent past. Sadly it’s also not uncommon for such bugs to hang around for awhile before being resolved.