Mesh Planning

[Hightime]

I have browsed previous posts but not found what I'm looking for - apologies for raising another Mesh question - I can see that there have been many.

My house has Sky Q and the TV Box is connected to the satellite (obviously) and via WIFI to the router.

I also have a garden office (man cave) which is fed via ethernet from the house, but has a minibox to repeat the wifi in the office.

I have a fair amount of smart home equipment that is currently configured to connect to the router - it's set up with two networks - 5 Ghz and 2.4 Ghz to accomodate the fussy smart stuff.

I'd like to set up a MESH system of my own. 

Reason 1.... Considering leaving Sky and want to make my house robust against any future router changes (all my smart stuff will need reconnecting each time I change router - so I figured a one time change would be a good idea.

Reason 2.... I want to be in good shape in time for us getting Full Fibre - scheduled in the next two years...

Reason 3... If i get rid of my Multiroom boxes I'll need wifi repeaters anyway.

So... I've read that I should turn off the wifi on the sky router and then install my own own system behind that. 

Something like this..... SKY ROUTER.....>NEW MESH SYSTEM....>ALL MY HOUSE WIFI CONNECTIONS.

But....If I turn off the sky router, will my TV box speak to sky router 'through' my new Mesh router? That seems like a potential issue, although I'm guessing that people have dealt with this before me.

Are there any other pitfalls ahead of me?

Does anybody have examples of good sytems they are using successfully?

Many thanks in advance

KInd regards

Paul

[CoffeeDrinker]

Hi @Hightime 

Your existing main Sky Q box should be ok talking to a third party mesh network, rather than directly to the WiFi radios on your Sky router. Similarly your mini boxes should do the same, although as you note, they'll just be clients on a new mesh network rather than repeaters/mesh extenders for the current Sky router/Sky Q based WiFi network.

Not quite the same but when we got Sky Glass & a Sky Stream puck, we were using a pair of white BT Whole Home mesh discs for WiFI rather than the Sky Broadband hub (we'd turned WiFi off on the later). Our setup then was similar to the one you;re thinking of: SKy Broadband hub (WiFi disabled) > ethernet connection to first BT mesh network disc > Sky Glass and Stream as client devices.

This worked fine. We have since moved to replacing both the Sky Broadband hub & BT WHole Home discs with the Sky Max hub, primarily for WiFi 6.

If you are going the third party mesh route, it is worth investing in the highest spec possible/budget allows for, with WIFI 6 support for client devices pretty much a minimum.