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SkyDSL - Pure Hell

Horrible liers & expensive = average speed in the evening: 50kb/sec

Hi,
my setup: barcelona, mostly clear sky looking k9-sat

experience : horrible

my tarif: business - 6000

average speed over day: 100kb/sec
average speed after 6pm: 30-50kb/sec
maximum speed for max 2-3 minutes a day : 2MB/sec (so its not the dish or whatever)

my advice: don't use if don't have anything left.
else: I tried Flat-L tarif for 49Euro = same results

my conclusion (after many calls with them) : rip-off company with constantly lying in all aspects. I am now in the business tarif and the connection just got worst. They told me its about pool-ratio (normal users 1:50 people) and so upgraded to business (1:20 people). After discovering its just worst (sometimes down at 10KB/sec) I asked them to downgrade my tarif again = 50Euro for getting my normal tarif back. All in all this company is thief and strongly on the illegal side of business.

I am professional developer and they even insulted me at the phone that I can't make the math (minimum speed= tarif speed / 50 or divided by 20).

Don't forget: they make me finally pay 120 Euro for an average speed all day long at 50KB/sec (which is a ISDN-Modem speed from 1995).

I am so upset that I will setup a website : skydsl-review.com because their reviews seem to be faked as well!

In german:

Das ist totale abzocke! Die reviews auf deren website einfach ignorieren, egal welchen tarif ihr habt, ihr werdet viele Euro fuer ne ISDN Leitung bezahlen. Im prinzip ist das einfach alles gelogen was die da an Zahlen schreiben. Wenn ihr es nicht unbedingt braucht, auf jedenfall etwas anderes nehmen weil 50KB/sec bedeutet auch das nix funktioniert, weder Youtube oder aehnliches.
 
I am not sure what we can do for you since this is an ISP support website to help UK internet users all our contacts are UK based.
Since you are talking about a satellite company selling broadband to your home in Barcelona. None of our members would have any need for this company.
 
Just wanted to add my personal review of this company to inform others who may be thinking of signing up to their service.

I was trying to change from my 7Meg Tiscali ADSL (Land Line) to SkyDSL (satellite Internet), I wanted high speeds for watching videos and especially uploading. I went for the skyDSL2+ FLAT L with the upgrade to 25Mbps download and 6Mbps Upload speed.

First of I do not recommend anyone use these bunch of con artists, they are liers and thieves, the service they offered is nothing like they promised. Having said that for completeness and because it applies to most all self-install satellite internet set up I will review the installation.

Everything started beautifully, equipment came in about two weeks, I mounted the dish and had it all configured in about two hours, I was pretty lucky that I found the signal randomly while moving the dish in the general direction. I am an IT / network guy so others might find it quite difficult to set up, the instructions provided were very poor and confusing even for me but some research on the web sorted out my questions, although not from skydsl's website I might add which I think is awful and luckily I still had my old internet to do the research.

Unless you are just planning to plug the satellite router into a single PC you will need a network switch (or a router that can act as one) to connect other PCs or to provide Wifi, there is no wifi built in which is a shame and only one networking port. Luckily I have lots of networking gear so this was not an issue for me but it did surprise me that the satellite "router" did not include a 4 port nic with wifi which has become ubiquitous with other ISPs offerings.

So I am all set up, have a decent satellite signal and I can reach the activation page so go to activate my account but it gives me an activation error, So I call SkyDSL and I am told that I have to wait a few more days as my contract had not started yet. :( A few days later I am finally let onto the internet.

Speeds initially were close to what I expected, so I spend the next few days testing what I can do, Youtube (Download and Upload) nice and fast, torrents pretty good, steaming to twitch was good also, the biggest disappointment however was website speeds, websites load slow, this is down to all the individual files that need to be downloaded and because satellite internet has such high latency all the back and forth communications take a lot longer and makes websites really slow to load, even compared to my rubbish Tiscali ADSL.

So I said to myself I could live with websites downloading a little slower as I would have really fast video streaming etc so I was sort of happy..... at least for a few days...... than I start noticing periods where the speed would slow to an absolute crawl, mainly at peek times but not always, now you can expect some slow down and I would see a slowdown at peek times on my previous Tiscali ADSL but this level of slowdown was ridiculous. My download speed went from 20-25Mbps download speed (Speedtest.net) to about 0.2Mbsp or less, basically the internet just became unusable even to just check email.

I contacted SkyDSL who advised me that as I had transferred over a lot of data (>30GB) of data in the time I had been using their service that my account had likely been pooled with all of the heavy users so that my 25Mbsp Bandwidth (50/1 contention ratio) was now shared only with 50 other really heavy internet users. Now you might think 30GB is a lot, but when you have your whole family watching youtube most nights (we don't have tvs in the house as Italian TV is terrible) 30GB is not a lot and the whole reason for opting for the highest speeds and with a company that promised "No Restrictions on volume and no Fair-use-Policy" as a major selling point was so I could use a lot of bandwidth without worrying that I might be subject to this type of traffic shaping or restrictions.

I actually swapped back to my awful Tiscali ADSL during one of the evening peek periods when I could barely get a website to load and I was able to get a speed test of 4Mbps compared to less then 0.2Mbsp on the satellite system. So I said to myself why am I paying about 4 times the price of my original ADSL for a service which was basically unusable during the very period when most of my family wanted to use it.

So I cancelled the service with SkyDSL, however they continued to insist that I must now pay to return the equipment, EU law states that if the product you have received is faulty or not as advertised then you can claim a full refund and the supplier has to pay return postage for the item. Quite clearly the service "which the equipment is required for" was not as advertised so I told them I would not be returning their equipment at my expense and I warned them that I would be charging them storage costs should they not arrange to pick up the equipment.

Finally I had to raise a paypal claim against them and they refunded my payments and then sent me a prepaid return for their equipment which I sent back.

I feel SkyDSL have lied and their website was highly dishonest, they are breaking their own terms of service, in all of my time in the internet industry (I have worked in Technical support and web design for London ISPs and I own my own hosting company) I have never experienced such bad and dishonest service.

All in all an awful experience and I would wholeheartedly warn against using them as an alternative to even basic ADSL. I am just very glad I didn't cancel my land line as I had planned.

Don't do as I did and ignore the bad reviews, I had read the reviews but foolishly I assumed it was isolated cases or user error. I was wrong.
 
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