topic Mini Box Broadcasting Wifi Signal in Sky Q

Mini Box Broadcasting Wifi Signal

mountain+mart — Fri, 10 May 2024 06:55:43 GMT

I have two hardwired ethernet cabled mini boxes.
When I test the ethernet cable by plugging them into my laptop directly, the speed tests at over 500mbps (using fast.com)
Plugging the cable into the miniboxes, the best wifi signal only returns just under 80mbps.
As I understand it, miniboxes are limited on their ability to be a hotspot, but surely I should be able to get a better speed than this ?
(For info, main Q box has both 5 and 2.4 htz broadcasting enabled)

Re: Mini Box Broadcasting Wifi Signal

TimmyBGood — Fri, 10 May 2024 08:55:42 GMT

@mountain+mart wrote:

Plugging the cable into the miniboxes, the best wifi signal only returns just under 80mbps.
As I understand it, miniboxes are limited on their ability to be a hotspot, but surely I should be able to get a better speed than this ?

With the Mini boxes having 100Mbs ethernet chipsets rather than gigabit, that's an obvious bottleneck. In theory they are potentially much faster used as WiFi relays rather than APs

However it's worth remembering that the Q specification dates from 2015 and was never intended to sling the faster FTTP speeds around.

Re: Mini Box Broadcasting Wifi Signal

ftballman — Fri, 10 May 2024 08:36:50 GMT

All the sky q equipment is limited to 100 speed network cards. As you said, this limits their use as a hotspot but I've never read anything positive about their performance on that end.

Re: Mini Box Broadcasting Wifi Signal

xenon81 — Fri, 10 May 2024 08:45:48 GMT

@ftballman wrote:
All the sky q equipment is limited to 100 speed network cards. As you said, this limits their use as a hotspot but I've never read anything positive about their performance on that end.

The V2 and V3 main boxes have 1000Mb ethernet ports but V1 main boxes and minis are only 100Mb.

Re: Mini Box Broadcasting Wifi Signal

ftballman — Fri, 10 May 2024 09:08:21 GMT

Ok, didn't know that. Thought it was a general decision not to push any higher.

Re: Mini Box Broadcasting Wifi Signal

mountain+mart — Fri, 10 May 2024 15:38:38 GMT

So why can I only get 78mbps from a minibox ?!

Re: Mini Box Broadcasting Wifi Signal

TimmyBGood — Fri, 10 May 2024 16:10:34 GMT

@mountain+mart

There's some speed drop inherent to the jump from 100Mbs ethernet to 802.11ac WiFi. As a general observation, a few seconds pondering the age, specification, size, shape and intended main purpose of a Q Mini box might indicate it's not actually likely to be a particularly good wireless access point: 'better' dedicated devices can be obtained for under £30.

Remember that the Q 'hotspot' feature was a marketing thing back eight years ago when home 'mesh' devices were a real rarity (and average domestic broadband was considerably slower) : it hasn't aged particularly well, and noticeably Comcast/Sky chose not to incorporate any such thing in Glass/Stream.