My experience with the new Sky Broadband Hub

[Chrisee]

@NSyl there are numerous cordless phone systems around with multiple handsets where you can have phones throughout your home. The additional phones come with their own charging stands. My own system at home has 4 handsets and is from Panasonic. Argos stock lots as do Amazon of course.

[Mark39]

@NSyl you shouldn't need to leave the handset on the charger all the time. Mine charges overnight which is perfectly adequate. Haven't run out of charge yet!

[AndreaB2]

question though why pay for a sky router when you can pay for 

ASUS RT-AC86U Wi-Fi AC2900

[Ginger+Roo]

I have just purchased a new broadband hub (sr203) and tried to replace my sky q hub. I changed the SSID and password to match my old settings but i had some issues. Some devices connect but others would not. The main sky q box would not connect even using wps. Are there any settings i need to play with as i understood that it should work pretty seemlessly with better performance. Any help would be much appreciated!

[Luarena]

Hello James, I received my Sky Broadband Hub yesterday. I'm not very technical, but hopefully I will be able to connect this later. My daughter is working from home, so I will leave the connection until after 5pm, in case it messes with her work. Can you reassure me that any programmes I have recorded on Sky Q will not be lost?

Cheers, Luarena

[Chrisee]

Hi @Luarena  changing the router should not cause your Q tv box to lose recordings.

[Luarena]

Thank you! Fingers crossed!!

[Rocky300680]

Because it cost £179

[MAW8]

Hi,

Can I ask what does '5Ghz Q Mesh OFF' mean? 

I have just upgraded my broadband and was given a speed of 45Mbps but am currently receiving 43. I have not as yet tried changing any settings on the hub.

Regards,

Mike

[Chrisee]

@MAW8 where are you seeing "5GHz wifi mesh off"? In practice leave both wifi bands synchronised and only change settings if you hit issues. The hub has dualband wifi and the 5GHz band is the faster of thec2 bands and less prone to interference.

When measuring speeds be clear what is being measured Sky apps and the hub quote the synchronisation speed to the cabinet, however when you measure speeds using a test on a device you have to allow for roughly 8% of network overheads.  

If you have only just been upgraded there is a good chance speeds will rise over the nextv10 to 14 days as the DLM optimises your line.

[MAW8]

Thanks for the reply.  It is a new connection so I'll give it a little more time.

Mike

[Stubbsy85]

In my experience the new hub 4 is worse than the original on speeds. It's quite strange because I contacted Sky as I was having WiFi issues with my Ring doorbell having poor connection (I don't live in a mansion, it is only one wall away from the hub!) I almost left because Vodafone we're claiming to guarentee me faster speeds and Sky had never managed to get my guaranteed speed of 44.1, I never got above 41 but they convinced me to pay £5 more for boost and the new hub, claiming it is much much better. Well it certainly fixed the doorbell issues so I was pleased with that however, I now never get above 32mbps. An openreach engineer came out and said it was defiantly the router, he plugged the old one back in and instantly 40-41 mbps again, plug the new hub back in and it drops again. Contacted sky and they sent me a replacement which arrived today and the speeds are still between 28-31mbps. Now I'm in limbo, faster speeds with poor coverage or slower speeds better coverage. 

[Ian27]

I got the new SR203 a while ago but I have had to remove it and install my older router.

On the SR203, the Sky app and  in My Account it states that I am getting 59mb, I wish !

we were getting between 1mb and 5mb a lot of the time with the odd improvement up to 30mb every now and again.

On my Sky app using their Test feature it kept saying my speed could be better even though it was showing 59mb ( apparently) not that I believe what it says.

I was getting that much grief at home I swapped the router out for my old one and immediately hit 30mb  but this too is not great when I should get 59mb. At times it too drops to 5mb but nowhere near as often as the SR203.

The other issue with this older router is that it doesn't like iPhones for some reason so we all regularly have to turn our wi fi on our phones off then on to get it to work.

Even buying a 3rd party router may not help, don't want to waste money if it is no better.

Time for a change when my contract is up I think.

[Stubbsy85]

@Ian27  If you are not getting the guaranteed speed and they cannot fix within 30 days you can leave with no penalty 

[Chrisee]

@Ian27 & @Stubbsy85 the "guaranteed speed" Sky will use is the connection speed to the hub NOT the wifi speed measured on a device. The My Sky app will show you the connection speed - you can check it on the hub by bringing up,the hubs stats Find your Sky Broadband router statistics. It is extremly rare to have a noticeably different connection speed between two different routers they all connect at the same speed give or take which is determined by the length and condition of your phoneline.

The fastest speedtest you can get on a device is 92% of the connection speed as you always lose 8% to network overheads. The SR203 does have better wifi than the older Sky Q hub (err110 or er115) but any wifi router is going to be affected by interference and will lose signal strength when the signal passes through walls etc. if you have bought Sky's Broadband Boost Sky guarantee 3Mb/s wifi speed in any room in your house - note not gardens or outside. 

The wifi on my SR203 is far faster than my external connection at around 600Mb/s in the same room falling to 300Mb/s through an internal wall when measured by the app Wifi Sweetspots. However place a piece of metallic foil between the device and the hub speeds drop massively as metal effectively blocks wifi signals and the device can only access reflected signals. When running speedtests ensure nothing else is running on your network many devices do updates etc when idle do not assume you are seeing all of the bandwidth available.

Ring Doorbell are a frequent issue firstly they normally require the two wifi bands to be separated as they have only a 2.4GHz wifi chip and they are designed for the US market so cannot use ch12 or ch13 we use in Europe. They are always going to be an issue where they are installed on a UK cavity brick wall - US houses are normally constructed with a wooden frame - as simple physics means wifi signal strength is attenuated by solid objects and being outside reflected signals are minimal..