Hi,
I’ve got this problem with my new Sky Ultrafast service and have had since I had it installed 5 long, long weeks ago…
In short the Sky router, every 2-4 hours, resets itself -the ethernet, Wifi and phone lights go from green to not lit at all and the power light goes red. It then restarts itself one light at a time. As I said this has been happening every 2 – 4 hours since I had the service installed.
So essentially, I have an intermittent broadband service and a basically unusable phone service (phone calls drop out due the reset etc).
As you can imagine I’ve been on to Sky about this quite a bit. I will say that every sky person I’ve dealt with has been kind, patient and sympathetic and keen to help me resolve the problem. Unfortunately, depending on who you get when you ring up, the awareness of issues like mine are not spread evenly throughout the support staff (some of heard of similar problems, many haven’t) and I always find myself having to explain the problem every time I ring up and we have to go through the same troubleshooting steps that I have repeated innumerable times before.
So currently:
- I’ve had 14 calls (always initiated by me) with Sky on this issue.
- 1 sky engineer visit
- I’m on my 4th Sky Router (SR203 model)
- I’ve had OpenReach out 3 times – they’ve changed their modem, tested the line etc and are adamant that it is not them causing the issue (which I tend to agree with as the dropping out of the broadband connection shouldn’t cause the router to reset – I’ve sort of proved this to myself by simply unplugging the cable from the ONT to the router and unsurprisingly it doesn’t cause the router to reset).
We have tried every obvious trouble shooting thing you can reasonably think of:
- Power direct into a wall socket (the power brick is usually supplied via a UPS I have to ensure the ONT, Router and Sky Q tv unit stay up)
- Power into a wall socket on the other side of the room
- Power into a wall socket in a different room
- New cables between the ONT and the router
- Soft and hard router resets (soft being just press the reset button and let go, hard being hold the reset button in for 10 seconds and let go) and have ensured the latest firmware is installed on all the routers I’ve had.
Now I should at this point probably talk about what I have attached (wired and wirelessly) to the router:
- On the wireless side I have a doorbell camera and various phones, ipads, laptops and Echo devices.
- On the wired side I have a pre-existing wired ethernet system that consists of a Synology NAS, 7 IP cameras, the main Sky Q tv box, 2 TVs, an Xbox, a Sonos Playbar, an Arlo Camera base station, 1 PC and 1 Laser printer. These devices are spread throughout the house and I have cabling that runs from room to room (outside) and at each entry into a room there is a simple Netgear switch that distributes to the devices in that room (TV, Sky Q and Playbar in the living room, the PC and the Printer in the spare bedroom etc.). I should point out that this wired network has been working for years without fault when it was connected into my (non FTTP) Sky Q router before I moved over the new FTTP Sky Router. I’m not an expert on networking but over the years I’ve managed to set up and run my wired network without too much problem (for example I have made sure that it is the Sky router that is assigned as the DHCP server and all the other devices are set to receive a DHCP address, that the IP ranges are ok etc).
So I have a more extensive wired set up than some but nothing too dramatic (IMHO).
Anyway I’ve doing as much trouble shooting as I can from this end and have come to the conclusion that the router can’t handle running this modest wired setup. I say this as because I have tested the router without any devices attached (using wifi only) and the router ran for over 24 hours without falling over. In a fit of excitement I then attached the router back to the wired network (by connecting into the nearest network switch in the room) and the router fell over about 2 hours later. So I then began the worlds slowest game of whack-a-mole and resorted to plugging in only 1 device (directly by moving the NAS next to the router) and it fell over in about 6 hours. So then I tried connecting 2 other devices in instead (the tv and the playbar) and it too fell over a few hours later. So far I haven't found one consistent device that, when connected, is the source of the resetting.
Yesterday things got even worse as the voice service would not come back on after it tripped and reset itself. I did both hard and soft resets but to no availabe - still no voice service. So again I rang up sky this mornging. The conversation did not, unfortunately, fill me with much hope. The guy seemed first to be convinced it must be an OpenReach issue and I had to spend 20 minutes demonstrating that it wasn’t. He then variously suggested that:
- More than 3 wired devices connected to a router is very unusual and maybe I simply had to many devices attached.
- The switch I was connecting the router into was likely faulty (even though when I had previously bypassed the switch and plugged things in directly it still fell over).
- Just because my wired network worked when attached to old router doesn’t mean it should work on the new FTTP router as it’s a different technology (which just seemed rubbish to me as if anything the old router was effectively a wifi access pont, ethernet switch and a modem whereas the new router is only a wifi AP and ethernet switch device and I really doubt the ethernet switching technology in the new router is much different to the old one).
- I plug everything back in again and if it falls over again that proves it is the switch that is the problem (I failed to follow the logic on that one tbh).
So we’ve left it that I will plug, directly into the router, a few devices and he’ll call back tomorrow afternoon to see if it has fallen over yet. Where we go from there, I’ve no idea.
To be honest I’m at my wits end on this - having had to reset the wifi on every wireless device in the house 4 times due to the router changes, having to reconfigure the survelliance package on the NAS everytime I do a reset due to the IP cameras being given new IP addresses etc - it's exhausting after a while.
I am seriously thinking of asking for the service to be cancelled and that I then move over to another provider – probably BT as at least then I can provide my own router if needed as I’m convinced that the current Sky router / firmware is the source of my troubles.
Any thoughts/comments appreciated.
