Gigafast+ Hub Suspected Overheating

[KillerCars]

I had 2.5 Gigafast+ installed last Friday. The Gigafast+ hub (white cylindrical one) is sat in the open on a desk, not tucked away. I have only the WAN port and one LAN port in use, connected up to my internal network.

On Saturday, the router crashed/rebooted during a speed test, but I didn't think too much of it. Today (during work) I have had it crash and reboot a total of 3 times. This is with minimal network traffic, not downloading, streaming, etc. The router is very hot to the touch, so I grabbed my thermal camera to take a look. The environment around the router is not hot, and the room temperature was around 23.5C. On the outside of the casing, the front of the router is sitting at around 51C, and the rear of the router where the ports are is around 62C. I imagine it is getting a lot warmer than that on the inside, since the plastic surround does not make for a good heatsink.

I know the product is still very new, but I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same issue.

The design of the router so far is somewhat questionable. The web interface is pretty awful, and split with the MySky app making it harder to manage. The logs are extremely bare, not indicating any issues that could explain the reboots. There are no temperature readings exposed in the web interface to know how hot the thing is actually getting inside (CPU temp, etc).

Configuration of reserved IPs was very painful, I experienced:

• Multiple "500 Internal Server Errors"
• Comments not persisting a reboot
• Devices flapping between DHCP and reserved IP
• IPs mismatching between the web interface and the MySky app for the same devices
• "Service Checker" in MySky app reporting a router speed of 0Mb/s every day since install

Among other things...

Suffice to say, I'm not having a great experience so far, but my main concern currently is the possible overheating causing crashes/reboots of the router, as this affects my ability to do my job.

[TimmyBGood]

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@KillerCars wrote:

I know the product is still very new, but I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same issue.

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Yours is the first post that I'm aware of: very few UK users will have this hardware so far (although it's been on release to Comcast subscribers in the USA for more than a year)

[JimM1]

@KillerCars Yes that's hot for a Hub that's not doing anything special never mind pushing the envelope, if you have a themal issue get a fan on it if you have one at home and push some air through it plenty ventilation at the back to do so. You may also be able to get sky Tech support to pull one out a box and sit it standalone doing nothing, if it was 5Gb/s would be having something sitting under it before it ruins you furniture, Plate coaster's are pretty good if you have any of the hardened type.

[Chrisee]

@KillerCars it is worth reporting the crashes and heat to Sky as this is new kit but I will draw a Sky contact's attention to your post.

The temperature of 62 C is higher near the ports than I would expect but a lot of equipment does use the plastic case to disapate heat as you can use plastics which can conduct heat for this purpose like the Sky Q TV boxes. However the case should not go above a temperature which would cause you to be unable to pick up the unit which is normally around 50 degrees. Was the unit in direct sunlight by any chance?

All Sky hubs are heavily locked down and broadly are a poor choice for customers with specialist requirements this wont change with this one. The web interface is largely just for information with the only user settings moving to the app once the hub is properly installed. As an early user of several pieces of Sky kit it does take a few firmware updates to achieve stability as no matter the amount of testing issues emerge as these units go out to customers. It. Looks like the Hub7 is no different. The instability needs fixing.

[KillerCars]

Thanks, appreciate all the replies.

To answer @Chrisee - no, the hub is not in direct sunlight. I have the desks positioned on a shady side of the room to prevent glare on my screens. I would like to report to Sky, but admittedly I didn't look very hard at how to do that before posting here. Regarding the plastic case, fair enough if they are trying to use it to conduct heat, but so far it seems (in my experience at least) that the hardware inside is just generating too much heat for it to handle. My MikroTik 10gig switches use the cases for heat dissipation, but they are all metal and sit at around 40C, which is warm but not worryingly so - same goes for my PoE switches powering several cameras and sitting comfortably in the 30-35C range.

I appreciate this is new and they will still be rolling out fixes, though I do feel a bit like a beta tester. Being able to see internal router temps would be great, and having an export/import option for config would save me a lot of time if I end up being sent a new router. Not looking forward to the idea of having to set one up again from scratch.

I had the SR203 before, which, whilst it had some drawbacks, was actually ok in terms of features for my use case. I did have the internal WiFi turned off on that in favour of using my own mesh network, but I am reluctant to do that with the new router since it has WiFi 7 and my ageing mesh network is "only" WiFi 6 (not 6E).

The comment about this router having been used in the USA for a while already is interesting though - would have thought any temperature issues would have been spotted during that time.

[Chrisee]

@KillerCars I have drawn Sky's attention to your first post. You are right the unit should not be restarting or be running ss hot as you report. Of course it could be a faulty unit but whatever it needs fixing. Although the unit is based on a US model the UK version will have customisations so won't have identical hardware. 

Please do contact Sky as currently the route we have to escalate posts is not available  

[TimmyBGood]

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@Chrisee wrote:

@KillerCars  Although the unit is based on a US model the UK version will have customisations so won't have identical hardware. 

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And I don't think the Americans have theirs plugged into 2.5Gbs fibre.

[KevNewMedia · Accepted solution]

Hi @KillerCars 

Welcome to the Sky Community, and thanks for your post around this issue.

Thank you for tagging us @Chrisee. As suggested, can you call in to the contact centre please @KillerCars, so the team can take the appropriate action for you?

[KillerCars]

As an update; someone from Sky was supposed to call me on Thursday or Friday last week to discuss the issue, but I haven't been called as yet.

The router had been behaving for the last few days but has crashed/rebooted again just now. Reading 52C on the front, 65C on the back.

The service checker in the MySky app so far has never worked for "broadband". If I run a check manually, I get the following error: