My experience with the new Sky Broadband Hub

[Brian+slade]

I am tired of appliances not working or running slow. Engineer said I should have the three hubs hard wired. I am not happy with this. What's the other options ? Internet is a nightmare when working from home 

[Dave+H68]

I'm sure this subject and alot like it will rumble on and on..............

But, in my continuing saga.......

Today, I noticed my internet slow dramatically..... I use LogMeIn to access and work from my pc in my head office while I am working from home, and often blam our office servers but today it was awful.

So, I did an online speed check to find it was down to about 4mb!!  ( I have the Sky Superfast)

So... I thought I would take out my nice Netgear D6400 and put my Sky ER115 back in..... just plug it in and let it settle as I had to pop out for about 90 mins.

When I got back, all I did was plug my main PC back in via LAN and made sure the WiFi was still turned off from the last time I used it, which it was.

I did a speed check and whilst the ping was still 18ms, the speed was back up to 56mb.  Both the ER115 & the D6400 register circa 61mb on the line connection.

Now, bearing in mind that over the past few weeks with the Netgear router, and all of my 4 new managed switches and all of our devices (circa 25-30), we saw NO, Nada, Zero pkt collisions on the LAN, yet after a couple of hours, I was seeing about 40 - 50 on the ER115....... so, in reality, whilst it's more than Zero, and why would just 1 PC on an ethernet cable do it, ir was stil not bad.

BUT.... I then wired the rest of my Network back in.... the 4 managed switches, one of which has a wireless access point, and after a further 4 hours (6 hour uptime in total) I had nearly 40,000 Ptk Collisions on hte LAN!!

WOW.... needless to say, I've swapped back to the D6400.

As for my drastically slow internet during the morning, well I guess I'll never know, but we did then discover that BT were up a pole a 100 yards down our close, all be it past our point and further down the line from the direction of supply, so maybe it was that!

I've added a screenshot of the ER115 if it is of help to explain.......

[Dave+H68]

Here's the Screenshot as  a .jpg as I think the .png format may not work....?

[CdHutton]

I've just switched to the new router and made mistake of sending old one back. Wifi is terrible now. Wife and kids kicking off at me non stop and loads of apps don't seem to like to play with it so have to switch to 4G. Avoid. Im calling them tomorrow to see what they can do 

[Dave+H68]

@CdHutton 

I wish you luck my friend........ on 2 counts:

1. Actually getting to speak to someone

2. Getting a fix

I would never send any equipment back without:

A. Waiting a long time to make sure the new equipment works

B. Unless I REALLY had to

You'll hear responses about equipment still being the oficial property of Sky or whoever you use, but the bottom line is that all area's of their contract with you is the system and equipment must be fit for purpose..... although, I expect we have all realised that our view of that often differs from the supplier.

That said.... make sure you've given your new router time to settle down with the line after you plugged it in.

Hope you get a result.

[CdHutton]

Thanks. Yeah in hindsight not the best move but we are where we are. Getting towards 50 too and pretty good usually with these things but don't want to mess about with stuff too much. Shouldn't have to! 

The thing that's galling is when you are paying extra and have been sold it as an improvement. We are quite far from the exchange so only get 12mbps or so, any improvement would help with the kids all on stuff all the time. I'd love fiber to the property but it isn't available. 

[Jackie+fry]

Sounds like you have done a lot of work and know your stuff! I have had issues with WiFi all year and they never improve and 2 of us work from home and wifikeeos dropping. It's so Frustrating and am thinking of going back to virgin purely for WiFi but prefer sky for other things! They made promises they havnt kept to get me to switch from virgin last year! So now I'm wondering if the new sky hub guarantee would solve my issues! But then have to commit to another contract! My son also is a gamer and he always complains about how slow our WiFi is! 

[TimmyBGood]

@Jackie+fry 

Using WiFi for gaming is always sub-optimal, as it typically decreases speed and adds latency.  Wiring with ethernet or powerline adapters is likely to be better: that's why consoles still have ethernet ports.

[Papalazapoo]

I'd agree the SR203 is best avoided.

I have it sitting next to my... much older.... dsl-68u from asus. Basically the same settings.

With the sr203 in and on it is a nightmare. Slow reconnect, partial connections, dropped connections and slow for those that do connect. Turn off the sr203 and switch in the asus and it's a perfectly functioning network and uplink on all 50 devices.

Had an engineer out to it and he was perplexed by my skyQ boxes asking if we'd turned off DHCP.

I wasted a weekend of my life learning this and I am an expert. I feel really sorry for those that are not and struggle without understanding it is not their fault.

Shameful that Sky sent me this trash with actual knowledge of this issue.

[Dave+H68]

@Papalazapoo  True words, true words!

I'm not only amazed at the poor equipment that Sky are using, but I'm probably more amzed that they are taking the Apple aproach in trying to force users to only use the equipment they supply...... seemingly as a way of tracking us?? LOL

Thank Heavens for my Netgear D6400!

I'm also amazed about them using some kind of differeent system or priocess via Openreach to others as it obviously does them or us no favours.

Our internet went down shortly after midnight last night and was still down this morning, but a router reboot sorted it...... AMAZINGLY, when I ran a line test, our Ping was only 9ms...... that's where it was for years with EE, but since moving to Sky in th eSummer, 17 has been the best, 19-20 is the norm and into the 30's has been seen on a regular basis!

Like you say, I feel for the people who rely on Sky sorting it ut 😞

[MarkusMark]

Just switched to Sky for Broadband and phone having been with BT for years.  Been with Sky for programs for 20 years however and thought I'd simplify things by amalgamating the two.  Looked at going either totally with Sky or with BT but didn't want to lose Sky UHD so Sky won.  With BT I had the Smart Hub 2 and total wifi with 2 of the black disks to extend the network.  Everything worked pretty much as advertised although I only got 16Mbs download which was right at the bottom end of the guaranteed range.  We are however at the end of the line from the cabinet and everything pretty much worked as advertised with few drop outs and reasonable wifi speeds.

Was sent the SR203 hub by Sky and was filled with trepidation having read all the problems people were having but thought at least I could cancel within the cool off period if necessary.

My desktop pc is connected to the hub directly with both being upstairs in the same room and everything else is connected by wifi and after a week it's all working quite well to be honest.    My download speed is now around 23.5 Mbs and both the Sky Q box (2TB) and the mini box (both downstairs), are working well as wifi hotspots giving me a reading of 98% on my phone wifi app in the two rooms whereas the BT disks only gave me 71% and 64%.  I can stream HDR Netflix and Amazon Prime with no problem at all. 

Checking the router stats there seems to be about 3 Downs per day at the moment so I guess that's the line testing going on but I haven't noticed them as the line is up within 15 secs.  I have about 30 devices connected to the wifi and so far none have lost connection after reconnection.

I told Sky from the beginning I didn't want the VOIP and wanted to keep my landline as before and that's what's happened.

I sympathise entirely with the tons of people who are having perpetual problems, (having been there with the provider before BT), and I may well be joining them at some point in the near future, but I'm just posting this as the thread title relates to an 'experience with the new hub'.  I'm sh**ing myself in case we have a power cut as that's when the problems seem to start but without tempting fate so far so good in my case.

[CyberFriday]

@jamesn123  Does this hub do anything to address the sound drop outs being reported on the sound cutting out thread over on 

https://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Sky-Q/Sound-cutting-out/td-p/2894496/page/72

and the network storm activity that @GNinga reported from his wireshark fun ?

[CyberFriday]

@jamesn123  User error on my part. Should have read the original post date........doh..

[GNinga]

First time I've seen this thread and I've not had time to read much, so sorry if I'm repeating something people already know, but if the issues are with WiFi (but wired speed is ok), then it is often WiFi channel interference. There's a limited number of channels available and too many broadcasting devices nearby will interfere with each other (eg additional WiFi AP's or routers, mobile phones used as hotspots, neighbours WiFi etc). Things will sometimes improve if you reboot one at a time: WiFi routers, hubs, AP's, hotspots (waiting for each to fully reboot before rebooting the next one). Many devices will scan at reboot and automatically select the least busy channel, but usually only at reboot, so if you add a new WiFi device to an area that already has crowded spectrum, existing devices will stay on their original channels even if they are suffering interference and connections will become unpredictable (slow, loss of connection etc)...

If you want to see how crowded the WiFi spectrum is at your place, try using an app like "WiFi Analyser" You will almost certainly be surprised.

[mae-3]

@GNinga 

Your comments are correct for devices that only use the 2.4Ghz band but over 5Ghz, which the Sky Hub only supports the lowest manual channels, its less crowded and only very short range.

In my house, I'm up on top of a hill and receive about 30 wireless routers signals, a couple on 5Ghz, and I get speeds of 220Mbps throughput downstream and a maximum speed of my broadband upstream at 48Mbps throughput.

Tested on fast.com over wireless to MacBook Air.

Truthfully, I consider all Sky's older routers poor and the latest not much better unless somebody can show me performance so experienced by myself. I doubt the Sky Hub's including the SR203/SR204 could even push more than 150Mbps throughput through them even over ethernet... 😎