Dropouts & High Latency After Switching to Sky Hub 4.2

[osbord]

After advice from Sky I switched our old Sky Q Hub to the Sky Hub 4.2. However, ever since the switch we have suffered from WiFi dropouts and extremely high ping times.

The dropouts are hard to catch and usually resolve themselves before a test can be done but the stability issue is constant, see below for a test run just before this post. We're using Devolo Magic 2 powerline extenders but the issue remains when directly connected to the router 

Any ideas what to try? I'm tempted to revert back to the old hub if we can't improve things

 

 

[Chrisee]

@osbord the stats show the hub has been connected for 81 hours and you have a line with a very low level of noise. No apparent issues with either the hub or line. 

You do however look to have an issue with packet loss if you were using WiFi the most likely cause would be wifi interference. However I assume you are using ethernet again if via Devolo powerline adapters that can be caused by interference caused by devices switching on or off causing mains spikes. Powerline is pretty good but not perfect. We can ignore interference if you get packet loss over direct Ethernet connections and assuming you are not sharing the connection with other a number of other users who are gaming or streaming video it is quite strange.. 

Sky offer no guarantees on latency but it is worth setting up a Broadband Quality monitor using the public IP4 addtess on this site https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality this pings the hub at regular intervals and plots the round trip times this is useful evidence of network or hub issues.. Thecsite has useful help in interpreting the graphs.

[osbord]

@Chrisee , thanks for the reply, appreciated.

Should have been more specific, the Devolo extenders are still WiFi, its just that they use powerline to create the network

Using a signal analyser app the signal strength doesn’t seem terrible and we are getting some dropouts even in nominally “Excellent” areas.

Turning off extraneous appliances helps a little on signal strength but too early to say it has a noticeable effect.

The hub change timing seems too coincidental so next steps are a) to connect to the extenders via ethernet and b) switch back to the old hub to see if the issue disappears

[jamesn123]

@osbord 
There is a couple of collision packets on your LAN side. What do you have connected via ethernet to the hub?

[osbord]

@jamesn123 

The LAN component of the Devolo mesh network system and the Sky Q box

[Chrisee]

@osbord my money would be on the Devolo system especially if these have their own wifi access points as interference between those units and the Sky system is a possibility as having 2 different wifi systems in the same house requires careful management to as two signals using the same or adajacent wifi channels will interfere and cause packet loss, A WiFi analyzer app on a mobile device should help check if that is a likely issue.

[jamesn123]

I agree I suspect the powerline adapters. I would try disconnecting those from the LAN then giving it another test. If that doesnt change anything try connecting the Q box via WiFi instead of ethernet as Q boxes are known to mess with networks when connected via ethernet.

[osbord]

Thanks @Chrisee @jamesn123 for the suggestions 

Now I do actually recall that we had issues connecting the Sky Q box to the new router via WiFi and ended up hardwiring it, which wasn't the case before.

I will try this first then move on to isolating the Devolo stuff 

[osbord]

Just rounding this off in case someone else is having the same issue.

Connecting the Sky Q tv box wirelessly made no difference, connecting devices via ethernet to the Devolo magic units works fine as expected.

So finally went back to the old Sky Q hub and the WiFi problems disappear 

No idea whether the 4.2 hub is faulty or has some feature that is just not compatible with the Magic 2 extenders but I guess I have a few months to figure it out before the updates stop on the old router 

[Chrisee]

@osbord the wifi setup between the er115 and SR203 are very similar ie they bothsupport the Q wifi mesh. The main difference is a better aerial array so greater range. With Q mesh each Q node ie the hub, sky Main box Sky Q Mini and any Sky extenders act as wifi hotspots. Eaxh hotspot will use a different 2.4GHz channel which if you have 4 units means any third party wifi source will interfere if the range overlaps. While you can set a manual channel for the hub you cant control the Q boxes. 

Sky Q mesh uses a signal that uses ch36 to ch52 in the 5GHz band again this causes issues with third party extenders unless they can use channels higher than ch52.you can programme both hubs to use half of the bandwidth (ie 40MHz rather than 80MHz) so ch 36 to 44 or ch44 to 52 - is it possible you had made that change on the Er115?