topic Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth in Sky Q

Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

pbirah — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 10:33:57 GMT

Hi,

I have sky q main and mini boxes dotted around the house on cat 6 cabling with gigabit unmanaged switches.

Recently I had Sky Fibre 900 installed and noticed that I was only getting ~280mb from speedtests via ethernet, whereas wifi at the router was getting me ~400mb. Hardwiring at the SR203 showed I was getting 880mb. This led me to beleive an issue with my switches or cabling perhaps.

After much diagnosis and testing cables and switches and isolating the network areas, I slowly managed to achieve the 880mb around the home.

The only way I was able to achieve this was to unplug each and every Sky Q Main and Mini box from the switch resulting in them no longer on my home network. This has now resulted in the minis no longer working since they are not picking up the connectivity to the main box.

All cabling round home is 90% cat 6 with a couple of runs of cat 5e. All patch cables are either cat 5e or cat 6. I have rulled out cabling and patch cables as the issue.

The moment I plug any one of the Main or 3 minis back into the home network, imemdiately, anywhere in the home regardless of the segment, my speed tests drop to 280mb from 880mb. Interestingly at the Sky SR203 router from a different port to the slowed down home network, I still see speeds of 880mb.

Any thoughts on what can be done here ? I have a suspicion I may need to replace all of my Netgear GS308 unmanaged switches with managed versions and set up VLANS segragating all the way back to the Sky broadband outer.

Thanks,

Pav

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

TimmyBGood — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 10:43:33 GMT

@pbirah

Unfortunately that's been noted before in this forum, and given the vintage of Q (effectively now a decade old design, so long pre-dating domestic FTTP bandwidth) it's unlikely to be addressed by Sky.

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

Chodley — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 23:37:46 GMT

They spam the hell out of the network with broadcast packets, unfortunately. A vlan might help. I put my Q behind a 100Mb switch and a (wifi 5) mesh node which I think throttles it effectively by pure luck.

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

deroo — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 13:16:56 GMT

Hello! Same issue here. Had Gigafast installed today and whilst carried out some basic speedtests I found the speed to drop to aroun 270-280Mbps. Then I began the task of troubleshooting every cable and switch. Eventually I doscivered that unplugging my Q main box the speed increased. My home switches are unmanaged and despite having a couple of managed switches available, I don't want to have to use them as they do consume more power and are bigger than the unamanaged switches.

For now, I've had to leave the Q main box connected via WiFi. The SR203 router is also not WiFi 6 capable, so we'll never see more than 500Mbps over wifi even if you're standing next to the router.

Sky are unlikely to fix this, as I too have sniffed the network and see tons of broadcast traffic. I expect that now this traffic is going ove the WiFi bands it will kill that connection too! Might need to invest in dedicated Wifi APs like Google or Eero. I'm not switching to Glass, I still like the thought of retaining TV if the internet goes down.

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

Chodley — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 05:54:24 GMT

Having my box hardwired to a mesh node (bt wholehome) seems to suppress whatever it does spamming the network as I only have unmanaged switches and get 950+ on speedtest. I also have a basic Netgear ethernet-only router, don't know if that is a factor.

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

nrynryuk — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 13:22:38 GMT

Literally just discovered this exact issue after thinking we were being efficient using ethernet for as many devices as we could!

SkyQ into gbit ethernet switch - whole network crawls, Sky GBit fibre slugs at 120mbit/second on ethernet (WiFi seems OK?).

SkyQ ethernet straight into the router (Sky Hub 4.2) and all works fine - ethernet downloads hit 800mbits/second on the PS5 when I tested.

Quite why plugging it into the router directly stops the issue, I'm not sure - maybe this keeps the SkyQ broadcast traffic within the router ports?

As yet, we can't leave it connected this way as the cables from SkyQ to our router are running across rooms and through doorways...but at least I know the device causing the problem!

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

deroo — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 13:30:36 GMT

Yeah I think the ports on the router keep the traffic from broadcasting. If you use a switch as an access point then you're basically screwed (if you've got more than 100mbit internet speeds).

For now, I've had to revert to the sky nodes being on WiFi only. I've installed a TP link mesh and use that for WiFi and keep the Sky router's WiFi for the Sky Q boxes and my smart devices.

At least now you know, but it's still frustrating.

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

Zipmeister — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:52:09 GMT

Glad I found this, just for the reassurance I am not the only one! Had Full Fibre 900 installed last week, been trying to work out why the speeds were not great, so I've been debugging today and eventually landed on the SKy Q Minis plugged into switches is killing the speed! At least I know now and can get them all on the less reliable wifi!

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

nrynryuk — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 15:58:27 GMT

It is rather ridiculous that I suspect many SkyQ users are not getting their full broadband speeds, but may not even know about it - or are having speed issues and the cause is Sky's own hardware, and possibly Sky Support also have no idea.

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

coolbeans29 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:14:41 GMT

I can fully confirm this and state with confidence the broadcast storm that is SkyQ ethernet kills networks.

I have just spent a wonderful week of full fibre goodness everywhere in my home since removing SkyQ and sending the gear back to Sky.

I don't miss it either, I have a cheap USB drive connected to my 2016 OLED and it records Freesat to that just fine with series linking etc.

Everything else is covered by streaming services at a considerably cheaper price than this years renewal 'offer'.

It was interesting reading on this thread about how some users managed to isolate the problem using MESH nodes(BT etc) as it apparently seems to filter out the broadcast storm in some cases.

I would like to add that I too did extensive testing after realising my new fibre 900 connection never remained at those speeds after 24 hours and only rebooting my head end switch rectified it for the next 12 hours or so before I noticed the whole network slowing down to about 40% of the full speed again.

I'm very relieved that my network is in fact solid as I have invested in Multi-Gig gear that should accomodate any future bandwidth increases.

Other benefits are that all the devices on my network are now communicating much more smoothly, I was experiencing problems with ChromeCast Audio's disconnecting randomly over the time I had SkyQ connected, this has stopped overnight!

Overall I am happier now I know what was causing the problem all along and no more chasing my tail with STP settings etc.

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

Chodley — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 18:49:38 GMT

So your TV has a freesat tuner built in?

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

coolbeans29 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:07:55 GMT

Yes,

It is an older 2016 LG B6 55inch OLED running webOS 3, app support is still good at the moment and the Freesat HD tuner can record to a USB external hard drive.

It is not as smooth as the SkyQ interface on an old TV like that but still does the job nicely.

I have had a few LG and Panasonic TV's over the years and they all seem to support Freesat HD.

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

Wurst1 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:12:01 GMT

We are considering Sky Q + Gigafast (with the SR213 not SR203).

Just to confirm, this issue is only when the main Sky Q box is hardwired via ethernet, not via WiFi? Ours is currently connected via wifi only to a SR213 without any issues on Full Fibre 500.

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

coolbeans29 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:20:36 GMT

I can only speak for my own experience but I found that the network would get flooded when using it with ethernet, however when testing it via Wi-Fi I had similar problems. Its only now that all the gear has been completely removed from my network that the network is stable.

Sorry but I cannot verify anything now as I have returned the equipment.

My network would tick over at about 400 when the SkyQ was running but now I get the full 900, from what I understand each network behaves differently because of the different network topography in each home so I would not expect every user to experience the same exact problem in the same way.

Good luck with your Gigafast connection 🙂

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

mr.tickle — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:39:08 GMT

@coolbeans29 wrote:
I can only speak for my own experience but I found that the network would get flooded when using it with ethernet, however when testing it via Wi-Fi I had similar problems. Its only now that all the gear has been completely removed from my network that the network is stable.

Interesting thread. Thanks for the information - particularly about Wifi, as my instinct would have been to very reluctantly downgrade to Wifi if it happened to me (hasn't so far).

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

Zipmeister — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:56:27 GMT

I have my main Sky Q box hardwired to my router as that isn't the issue, it's when you hardwire the mini boxes that it throttled the speed so I have all my minis connected via WiFi and main box hardwired and I get my full 900Mbs.

Re: Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

mr.tickle — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:59:44 GMT

@Zipmeister wrote:
I have my main Sky Q box hardwired to my router as that isn't the issue, it's when you hardwire the mini boxes that it throttled the speed so I have all my minis connected via WiFi and main box hardwired and I get my full 900Mbs.

Right, thanks. No miniboxes here and never will be.