My experience with the new Sky Broadband Hub

[purpleparrotuk]

@Chrisee  @lettice said certain vip tiers kept the discount. I'm on silver. 

[Chrisee]

@purpleparrotuk seems likely as I said its up to Sky as they set the offers.

[purpleparrotuk]

I have the white booster at the moment. Will I still need to use this or have they changed boosters? Also I assume I can't just backup my hub settings and load the config into the new hub?

[purpleparrotuk]

@Chrisee thanks. Maybe I will contact them again. No harm in trying. 

[Chrisee]

@purpleparrotuk you may not need the booster so try without it. There is a purpose made booster for the new hub but the older Q booster msy work as well. 

Re the VIP level suspect Silver wont get you the offer as nothing on my MY Sky about it for me and I am in Gold tier. Worth asking I guess. 

[aberdeen19032012]

@MarkAPhilpot  what speed does your line actually take as maximum v what get 

[Loobs72]

I am still getting dropouts of internet connection with the new hub.  An engineer came out yesterday but they sent a tv engineer instead of a broadband engineer.  He did put one of the new boosters in but I'm still getting dropouts.  Does anyone else get this?

[aberdeen19032012]

When you say dropout do you mean areas when you get no signal at all? 

What was set up before you had this router and is it placed where old one was. 

[Loobs72]

I mean that the signal is fine most of the time then suddenly the mini box will freeze and I can’t access the internet on iPad at that time.

this used to happen all the time with the old sky hub.  I was then using a TP Link router whilst waiting for the new sky hub to come out. I had a booster connected by Ethernet straight into the TP Link hub.  I still got the occasional dropout but not as frequent as the old sky hub.  

I have got the same booster connection now with the new sky hub but the freezes are happening.  I just don’t get it and neither do the engineers.  I could understand it if it was just I can’t get a signal in a particular place but for it to happen randomly I don’t get it

[Chrisee]

@Loobs72 even though the new hub has better wifi the signal will still be attenuated by solid walls, blocked by metal and affected by interference so the same advice as always for those issues apply. If you post some details I am sure the forum can offer advice.

[Loobs72]

@Chrisee  What sort of details?

[Chrisee]

@Loobs72 you already have posted most of what is needed while I was writing that post. First question is there something near your main Q box that uses wireless signals especially wireless speakers or a DECT phone? Is the hub mounted low down if so move it up onto a shelf radiaters etc will cause major issues with any wifi hub. I would hope the engineer looked sround for most of the gotchas but worth doing it yourself see Improving Wi-Fi signal | Sky Help | Sky.com

Its the 5GHz band that is important for communication between the Q bboxes and the hub. Some wireless kit like Sonos systems use the same frequency as ch36 which is the default channel the Q mesh uses. If you duspect thst might be the problem change the hub to use ch44 40MHz to see if that helps.

[Loobs72]

Hi.  Nothing like that near the main q box.

The hub is on a desk with the booster next to it cabled by Ethernet.

i don’t have sonos so cant be that. The engineer was a tv engineer not broadband so didn’t really look for any potential causes.

[mwake]

New to this forum and stumbled on this thread.  With this new hub does anyone know if this hub improves the roaming assistance of the wifi mesh system with regard to non-sky Q devies better than the old hub?  I read a few posts on other forums on how that wifi mesh system roaming assistance wasnt efficient with regard to connecting devices to the nearest hotspot/minihubs.  I wonder if this newer mani hub improves the efficiency of the roaming assistance feature of the wifi mesh?  I would love to hear any thoughts on this.

[Chrisee]

@mwake the new hub's stronger wifi will improve the performance of the Q mesh as the speed of the wifi hotspots are dependant on the speed of ghe backhaul. Don't know what you have read but my devices roam seamlessly. What does seem to confuse some people is that there is no simple way of knowing which network node a device is using at any time. 

The other thing people who do not understand how mesh networks operate seem to get confused by is the tendancy for third party devices using the 2.4GHz band rather than the "faster" 5GHz band what they forget is with mesh networks the backhaul is as important as the link to the device so using the higher frequency band for that makes sense.

In practical terms the new hub has raised my wireless speeds by 10Mb/s above the Q hub I had before giving me a minimum of 65Mb/s anywhere in my home and 50Mb/s plus in the garden.of course YMMV