I want to cancel my new contract because of how useless the Sky Max Hub is

[ziejek]

Am I the only one? The hub insists that my laptop is wifi 4 all the time, limiting me to 90 mbps. Only sometimes, when planets align up the right way it decides "oh, it's a wifi 6 device" and gifts me with 650 mbps. For an hour or so.  Or if my screen goes dark. I have powers saving off for the network card btw.

I had very consistent 500mbps with 5yo virgin media hub. Only issue I had with them was the price for the service tbh.

And then is this. With my virgin router I could log in to it and play with the settings. With Sky Max Hub I can log in and click on things and that's about it. I can't even change the SSID. Not to mention any other important things. Read-only web interface. What's the point of having it in the first place?

Anyway, I still have 10 more days to cancel the contract I just signed.  How do you people go about those issues?

[TimmyBGood]

@ziejek 

Administration of the Max Hub is carried out in the My Sky app.

https://www.sky.com/help/articles/access-your-sky-broadband-hub-settings-max-hub 

[ziejek]

No, this is not administration of the router. This is a joke of a service. 

[JimM1]

@ziejek The device ie your laptop is connecting on the wi-fi 4 2.4Ghz band that is what and why you are seeing that!

[ziejek]

It's connecting to the router ok. But it struggles with 802.11ac connection. I alway had 500mbps+ with virgin router, now I feel like I'm 10 years back in technology and started to doubt in my laptop but when I plug my virgin router back in it's all good no more 802.11n speeds, so go and figure. 

Btw, my phone connects to 5Ghz no bother but once I disable 2.4Ghz my laptop gets nothing, all while connecting at 5Ghz to my virgin router is working just perfect

[JimM1]

@ziejek The sky Max hub likes to channel way up the Frequency range so NO idea where your Max is at, but the laptop may just not like operating way up there and if so you will not be able to get on the 5Ghz band. If you have something like Netspot app on your phone if Android based then it will show you what the channel is!

Also the WPA3-T wireless that the Max is OOB, you can use the app on your mobile drop it back to WPA2-PSK, will be way more happy with the older laptop settings! Link below if you need it!

If you want to cancel it is a call to sky, just so you are aware!

Sky Max change settings link.
https://www.sky.com/help/articles/change-wifi-max-hub-settings-a

[ziejek]

No, I kept WPA2-PSK as default, I think you can only change it through the app anyway. I hate this solution. [removed]. You can't say that my laptop is incompatible/doesn't like it when it in fact managed to get that connection working and was happily pulling 650 mbps down. How the modern hub could be so bad?

Moderator Actions: Removed inappropriate comment

[JimM1]

@ziejek Just putting the info out there for you, the forum as you see only get's the horror stories, all the goodies never complain! Takes one bad item on a wireless/wired network to cause havoc never mind compatability issues and not everything works as expected!

[ziejek]

>Just putting the info out there for you, the forum as you see only get's the horror stories, all the goodies never complain!

Of course it is this way. People only look for help if there's an issue. No one goes to the doctor to tell him he's doing fine at the moment too. 

>Takes one bad item on a wireless/wired network to cause havoc never mind compatability issues and not everything works as expected!

I mean, all the problems are gone if I connect back to my Virgin router (that is 5 years older than the Sky one), so I'm not imagining anything, I'm just observing discrepancies. And as I said before, sometimes, something just clics in and I get full speed over the wifi and that means it's not the hardware problem because it's already proven it can work. Is it the hub's software? How it decides that my phone is 5Ghz worthy but not my laptop? And the read-only web interface is another thing. I don't buy keyboard so I can look at the buttons and just geth high on the feeling what they could potentialy do if they worked. I do not understand the idea of locking the options.

If I'm buying the service I'd expect to have the right of using it. If I mess anything up it's on me

[JimM1]

@ziejek That is 100% correct, and the main reason that sky took ALL off the functionality out off the user's hands and reduced the web interface to nada, allowing just so limited with the app, cannot mess then nothing get's broken!

[ziejek]

What about the hubs that had admin and then the super-user? Some people just know what they need and some people will eat the wool thinking they will **bleep** out the sweater, you know what I mean

[ziejek]

>allowing just so limited with the app, cannot mess then nothing get's broken

So exclude 90% of users that may need the functionality to prevent 5% from messing up? 

It's like we should stop selling bricks because someone can drop one on their foot

[Chrisee]

@ziejek in practice your % are the wrong way round roughly 90% of users do not need to change settings only a small minority do. Sky like most mass market isps lock down the routers they send out precisly because most people struggle to understand the difference between broadband and WiFi.

Users who require extra features not available on the free hubs are free to use their own routers if they so wish. Sky will not provide support and you lose use of the digital voice line and you need to check compatability but you can join the few hundred thousand Sky customers using their own routers.out of the over 6 million total. This forum can and does advise on this very frequently

Alternatively you can as I do myself turn off the Sky hub's WiFi and use a third party WiFi system. In practice very few apps can use more than 100Mb/s apart from when downloading but you can buy WIFi systems that can deliver 900Mb/s or hugher in every room but the cost can be high. I find a WiFi5 system more than adequate but choose WiFi 6, 6e or 7 or wait for the inevitable WiFi8 standard. 

[TimmyBGood]

@ziejek 

Sky, like every other ISP, is moving to in-app router administration because web browsers are increasingly reluctant to communicate with hardware that has a self-signed SSL certificate.

[JimM1]

@ziejek My 2013 purchased Asus laptop has a wi-fi 4 chipset, but operates in the 2.4Ghz or the 5Ghz band, and prior to using a EE single band ssid wi-fi6 router was happy operating on the older sky SR203 Broadband Hub with split bands of course set for the 5Ghz for speed.

With the EE it would start off 5 jump back to 2.4 and had a mind off it's own at times, and i had the EE Router set how i wanted it, so slight change to the Laptop driver values, and it sorted the Laptop out and locked onto the 5Ghz band all the time.

All the ISP's have been heading down the single band route for a long time now thinking best way to go on advice of the wireless wi-fi group, so giving you NO choice as to adjust the hub, Asus for instance i have all 3 bands with seperated names and choose exactly where the device goes, my choice to use my own equipment and been doing so for many years. Cannot say much about the Max, have never used the device and would/will not as it is mobile app driven, had enough with the EE one but you could do a fair amount web wise but still needed an app to do other's. So just not for me!