WiFi dies occasionally-- broadband is up and ethernet works

[weeviloerlord]

We've had a problem happening for the past few months. I can't discern anything specific that has changed to have caused it. Here are the behaviors:

Randomly, could be on any day as far as I can tell, we'll wake up and the WiFi is non-operational. None of our devices will connect. Even so, the WiFi indicator light on our Sky Hub SR102 indicates that we should have WiFi. A device plugged in with an ethernet cable works fine. And connecting to the admin interface, viewing the log, I don't see any errors, just the typical pings to the time service and back to the Sky network to renew the DNS.

To fix this, I have:

1. Restarted the sky hub (in fact, this is the only way to get the WiFi back up).

2. Set the Sky Hub back to factory settings, followed by restoring my settings.

The problem has continued.

[Chrisee]

@weeviloerlord f it is prettyearly around 6am and you have Sky Q boxes it can be caused by devices losing connection to the Sky Q box wifi hot spots due to the TV boxes being in eco standby modecwhich switches off the wifi. If that applies change tge TV boxesxstandby to active or none.

[weeviloerlord]

Thanks for the suggestion.

Our sky box is Sky+HD and not connected to the router in any way (neither ethernet nor WiFi).

I wouldn't call it year round, either. It's very random. It'll work fine for days, or even weeks. Then one morning we'll wake up and everything has dropped, with the symptoms specified above -- ethernet good, anything on WiFi has disconnected.

As a side note, I did go looking for a firmware upgrade for the router, but it looks like Sky manages that for us, and there are no manual firmware upgrades, at least for the SR102.

[weeviloerlord]

Incidentally, I just did a scan of wifi networks around me, and no other hotspots are using the channels the Sky Hub is configured for. So that rules out channel traffic as the cause for the our wifi falling on its face.

[jamesn123 · Accepted solution]

@weeviloerlord 

If you have an SR102 it must be pretty old, you should get a replacement router from Sky to start with as its very likely that such an old router is just faulty

[weeviloerlord]

Fair play. I tend to use tech for the long term and try to avoid device churn.

Still a 9-year-old DSL modem/router is arguably a time to upgrade, if for no other reason than support for security patches is likely to be limited.

I also looked at what it would take to use a third party device...which doesn't look too hard...but I just don't have that kind of time in my life at the moment to find the right device, the configs for it to work, troubleshooting problems, etc. So I took a new contract and a free upgrade to a Sky Hub 4.

Hopefully it doesn't suck.

On the plus side, for the troubleshooting and looking at it this morning, I learned of the Wireless Diagnostics app bundled with MacOS. It's super cool and was able to scan all the wifi networks nearby, understand which channels they use, etc. It's a super cool utility if you've never used it. It puts a very clearly named .tar.gz file with diagnostic data in your /var/tmp folder. The wifi_scan.txt file will list every local hotspot and which channel it uses, including whether it's using 2g or 5g.

A bit of a tangent, but hopefully it helps someone in the future with scanning for conflicts with other local hotspot channels.

[Tadzma]

WiFi is spotty, dropping every 20 minster or so all day Monday. Reset router and it didn't help. I work from home so it's crucial for me to have reliable connection. Today it only dropped once. This is only the second time its happened in a year but my equipment is only 1 year old.