Gigafast wifi speed

[mormegil]

 you can get over the 900Mbps on wireless with the sky max hub and a compatible device, but it it also good to know that some WiFi 6 mobiles are locked at a lower speed by the manufacturer 

[jamesn123]

@markw2015 

The Sky hub supplied with Gigafast is already WiFi 6 & 5ghz so there is nothing further Sky could provide to you to get that speed. They can't guarantee that every single customer with the max hub will get those kinds of speeds because its varies hugely by location, device and local conditions. You have to keep in mind Sky is a budget ISP, you arent paying for the best of the best here.

[markw2015]

The sky 402 router supplied with gigafast is not WIFI 6 enabled 

Sky Broadband Hub specifications

• Wi-Fi: Dual-band Wi-Fi radios, 2.4GHz and 5GHz, 4x4, MU-MIMO, Wi-Fi 5 (802.11 a/n/ac), ADSL2+ and VDSL2
• Dual-Band Wi-Fi: Yes
• Tri-band Wi-Fi: No
• Ethernet: 4x Gbps LAN ports
• Extras: Smart channel selection, smart scan, firewall

Sky Broadband WiFi Max Hub specifications

• Wi-Fi: Dual-band Wi-Fi radios, 2.4GHz and 5GHz, 4x4, MU-MIMO, Wi-Fi 6 (802.11 a/n/ac, ax), ADSL2+, VDSL2 and FTTP
• Dual-Band Wi-Fi: Yes
• Tri-band Wi-Fi: Yes
• Ethernet: 4x Gbps LAN ports (1 can work as WAN)
• Extras: USB-C, 2 RJ11 ports, parental controls, downtime scheduling, OpenSync, DFS

[Highlinder]

@markw2015  On the Sky Broadband hub one of the ports is also marked as WAN when used for FTTP.

[Glendale]

I have gone around the houses today, absolutely raging!!

My three 20+ daughters moved back home.  After a while they began complaining that the wifi was pants in their bedrooms which, when playing COD, meant they kept getting killed or something.  After much persuation I relented and "upgraded" to gigafast.  BT fitted the openreach hub behind the TV, which is where the hub has been sitting for the last few months.

Over the next several weeks, the girls keep throwing their mobile phones in my face with a picture of the wifi speed.  Telling me that 150mbs is rubbish.

Today I bit the bullet and called sky, only to be told - very condiscendingly - that obviously the 900 mbs average is only if one device is using the hub and plugged directly in.  We have 19 devices connected, Alexa x 6, ring doorbell, phones, TV's and, of course, the Xbox's.

I was offered no advice, other than to move the broadband router from behind the TV (it's now on the windowsil) and a recent test sitting next to the router had a wifi speed of just below 500.  Again I was told that the router is fine and putting out 600mbs but when I asked for a chart showing recent performance I was told that this wasn't possible.  How can I get out of the gigafast contract (October 2025) if I don't have the evidence that the minimum speed isn't being reached.  

I asked if I could go back to the Ultrafast, I mean - why pay the extra £18?  The guy from customer retention told me that Ultrafast is actually £4 more expensive per month as I am on a deal.

So here's what is in my mind

Get another broadband router to connect to the other phone line and route all of the background wifi through, TV's, alexa etc and keep the giga for gaming

Or would boosters actually help?

If the speeds don't improve - is there no recompence from Sky.  I was on a £25 per month broadband contract, giga was £43 and now ultrafast is £47.  I can't cancel without proof of rubbish speeds but cant get the proof.  I can even check as the 192.168.0.1 doesn't work

I am not technically minded, so please speak plainly and slowly 🙂

[Anonymous]

@Glendale Online gaming requires relatively little speed to run smoothly. What is more important is low latency. High latency means high ping, which means lag, which means your daughters will get killed by an enemy on COD before they've even seen them.

Broadband speed is how fast your network can send and receive data, with many variables to consider. Latency, measured in milliseconds is the response time it takes for data to leave your device, reach its destination and get back again.

So imagine you have a fast car which can travel at 150 Mph. If there are a lot of cars on the road the car will have to slow down due to volume of traffic on the road. A car travelling at 50 Mph could also hold the fast car up. This is a very basic principle of how your broadband speed works.

Imagine then that you can travel full speed, 150Mph to where the gaming server is. Its never a direct route and you will have to stop and ask for directions on the way, as network packets do. Once you've reached your destination you do the same in reverse. You've been travelling at 150 Mph but because you had to keep stopping for directions it added to the time taken to get there and back. This is kind of the principle of latency.

If you were to add a booster the latency would be even higher because its like stopping for petrol. You'll be able to travel further but as you've stopped again you've added more time to your latency.

We call this ping.

Wifi is a very poor means of gaming becasue its more prone to interference and only half duplex. Being half duplex means that cars can only travel to their destination one at a time. The more cars are trying to go somewhere the longer each one has to wait before it goes on its own journey.

Ethernet on the other hand is full duplex. This means that your car can travel freely without any other cars holding it up because it doesn't have to wait its turn to go to its destination and back. It's also less prone to environmental interference which could slow it down.

So, to put it simply, connecting a gaming console or pc to the router via Ethernet is the only way to drastically improve the gaming experience. You could have a BB speed of 10 Gbps, but can still have very high latency on WiFi.

If you can't connect Ethernet direct to the router then you can get powerline adapters which use your electrical wiring to send network traffic as if it was wired. How effective they are depends on the quality of your working, as well as the actual power line adapters. TP Link 1gbps or AV1000 are what I would generally recommend. But also bare in mind that advertised speeds on these are theoretical and you will get nowhere near Gigabit speeds using these.

[Chrisee]

@Glendale as @Anonymous points out gaming as such requires minimal bandwidth something around 10Mb/s is ample. In practice few mobile apps can use more than 100Mb/s. Simething the media seem incapable of grasping a good connection is far more about latency and signal quality than outright speed. If your daughters are serious gamers they require ethernet cables run to their bedrooms as no gamer with any sense uses wifi on a mobile device. 😉

Wifi speeds are set by the signal strength which is affected by both the layout and type of construction of your home but also by the level of interference. The single free hub Sky provides is often not up to providing strong wifi in every room of even an average sized home especially if the house is older with solid walls actually no wifi router can be as all are only permitted to use the same power. That is why there is a market for loads of add-on tech costing from a few pounds to many hundreds.

Sky will sell you their WIFi Max system which guarantees 25Mb/s in every room which is actually more than enough for casual gaming etc. Sky will provide up to 3 extender units to achieve that if an engineer agrees they are needed. You can buy your own router and extenders if you prefer but youwill need some technical knowledge to set those up. If your daughters are keen gamers a router with QOS which prioritises gaming traffic would be a good idea but can be pricy.

The solution I use myself is to use the Sky hub to connect to the line with its wifi disabled but it is connected to a set of 3 mesh wifi units set to operate as access points which give decent wifi in every room but as I am mean that is around 200Mb/s in bedrooms but then my system cost £100 rather than £600 or more to get a pretty useless 900Mb/s 

One thought for anyone who thinks you need gigabit speeds or faster for modern life remember with Openreach's GPON system which Sky sell you you are sharing a single fibre connection to the exchange with a capacity of  2.48Gb/s with up to 31 other customers and in practice rarely have issues with contention (congestion). Its like buying a car with a top speed of 200mph when in practice you are limited to 70mph on UK roads.great for boasting and occasional track use but essentially useless.

[Glendale]

Thank you - that is making sense.  We have sky Q box in our room but only one router downstairs - It wouldn't be possible for them to run a wire to connect direct.

I have bought TP link thingys before but couldn't figure out how to connect them.  

One daughter has just bought a booster.

It's not exactly ethical of Sky though - selling a car that can go really fast when, in fact, I can't drive it at full speed.

[markw2015]

So basically Sky have told me that they have fixed my issue. The issue is with the current sky hub as it's not capable of more than 500 mbps.

If I wire a connection to port one on the back I can get up to speed 1.3gbps but only 500mbps over WiFi. 

I have been advised that the best way to resolve this is to turn WiFi off on the sky router and configure a wifi6 access point which should provide the required band width. 

what sky do is only measure your speed to the router and if that meets the minimum requirement then that's it as they don't Guarantee WiFi speeds. it's at this point that the excuses start. To many devices connected, don't guarantee WiFi, change the channel, restart the router, problem with one of the devices. 

on gigafast you are supposedly able to connect 105 devices and this happens with one or 23 devices attached as I've tested it. Oh well on to sky again tomorrow and ask if they can supply a sky max hub which apparently will deliver top end WiFi speeds rather than selling me a device that I can't actually use the speed available 

[Anonymous]

@Glendale Sky haven't done anything unethical. The car can be driven at full speed, but there arent very many roads that can accomodate it.

Examples of where higher speed could be utilised could be if you work in video editing and need to download very large 4k files to your computer. Provided that the computer at your end has a wired connection to the router from Gigabit network card and the server you are downloading from has a capable network infrastructure, then its possible to download at the highest possible speeds.

Another example is a gamer downloading very large games or updates to console or PC over a wired connection. The download speed will fluctuate significantly though depending on the network usage at both ends. I should mention here that Steam on PC is very resource hungry and can grind a home network to a halt if there isn't sufficient bandwidth.

Ultimately if you buy a fast car you should have the means or the knowledge to be able to use it to it's potential. If you don't then it's not the dealers fault.

Finally, to everyone who is complaining about not being able to achieve the full available speed, the biggest benefit of these packages isn't just about speed but bandwidth. The bandwidth is about the overall capability of the network. So if you have a 900 Mbps connection this is shared bandwidth. Eg. If you have six people in your household who all want to stream Netflix in 4k at the same time, that is around 6 x 30Mbps. That's a total of 180 Mbps. That leaves a massive headroom if you have 900 Mbps. Maybe 5 people could stream Netflix in 4k with a rough network usage of 150Mbps. This means that the person wanting to download his large video files for work still has 750 Mbps of available network resources.

People get too bogged down by walking around the house doing speed tests. The only consideration should be are my devices actually working as they should, considering everything we've already discussed like latency which shouldn't be confused with speed or bandwidth.

[TimmyBGood]

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@markw2015 wrote:

If I wire a connection to port one on the back I can get up to speed 1.3gbps but only 500mbps over WiFi. 

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Unfortunately both of those statements are incorrect: all Sky Hubs have gigabit ethernet chipsets, so getting 'up to speed 1.3gbps' is impossible, while both 802.11ac (Q Hub and Broadband Hub) and 802.11ax (Max Hub) WiFi is theoretically capable of more than 500Mbs in ideal wireless conditions (although only WiFi 6 client devices can use WiFi 6 broadcast from a Max Hub)