Replacing Q mesh for TV and wifi

[ceejaysix]

Hi all,

Have Sky Q, with SR203 router, main Q box, 4 miniboxes and an SE210 extender.

Used to work fine, then had house extended, now only reliable for one minibox.

TV works okay maybe 70% of the time but is somewhere between slight stuttering and unwatchable the other 30%, particularly when either using two outlying miniboxes simultaneously (I'm guessing main box in lounge at front of house connects to router in hall in middle of house, connects to booster in kitchen to rear of house, connects to minibox in kitchen in rear of house, in turn feeds both the movie room and the master bedroom miniboxes which can both struggle), or in bad weather (assume atmospheric conditions can affect signal - sometimes none of the miniboxes are watchable).

Wifi connectivity is fine (you can always connect to the network with good strength) but network speed is variable, occasionally unworkable for Teams etc, I'm guessing because the connection is also reliant on the mesh between the various Sky bits of kit - so you can connect to the nearest minibox access point fine, but that minibox isn't getting sufficient connectivity with the route to give solid internet access speeds.

At max devices on the Sky mesh, so Sky can't / won't do anything more to fix.

I'm thinking the way forward is to replace the mesh network altogether with a system that supports more nodes (right term??!!) than Sky's six to improve connectivity. No chance of hardwiring. Turn off wifi on all the boxes and ethernet each minibox / main box to the new mesh access points.

Questions:

1. Is the above sensible and will it improve things?

2. Do I need to replace the router as well or is it compatible with mesh access points (not sure if that's the right term) from another manufacturer?

3. What is the gold standard devices for a replacement mesh network (both router, if applicable, and access points / repeaters / extenders / whatever they're called)?

Assuming a similar range to the Sky kit, I reckon I'll need seven or eight mesh access points (one for the main Q box, one for each of 4 miniboxes, one to replace the current booster, and two (or maybe even three) more to boost signal in between the problematic miniboxes.

Thoughts / comments / pointers welcome - thanks!

[JimM1]

@ceejaysix The first question is what sky package do you have, and your max/min speed quoted.

With it working previously wonder why it has got so bad so quickly, perhaps foil lined pasterboard blocking signal etc. Layout is always an issue as you are mostly wireless connected at present.

Need somemore info from you.  

[Chrisee]

@ceejaysix one approach to try assuming you want to keep the Q tv boxes is to use a set of powerline adapters to improve the backhaul,connection between a didtant Q box and the hub which should both improve TV performance and the wifi. These adapters come in kits with 2 or more adapters one of which is plugged into a wall socket near the hub and linked by the short ethernet cable to the hub the second is similarly connected to a Sky Q box furthest from the hub. These units use the. properties mains wiring to send data improving the connection. 

When I had Q I used this approach as two of my Q minis struggled to maintain connection to the hub which was on a different floor. Linking one Q mini by a set of Devolo powerline adapters meant both Q minis operated well while significantly improving their wifi 

While you can buy a third party whole home wifi package you will find your Q mini boxes cannot connect to its wifi so you nedd to juggle two separate wifi networks to avoid interference issues or hard wire the Q boxes.

[jamesn123]

@ceejaysix 

The main problem you have is that you have the router + 6 nodes which is more than the recommend amount for Sky Q. Even if you decide to replace this with a 3rd party mesh system you may still find the Q boxes have connectivity issues because they still want to create their own link with the nearest Sky node. 

With the size of your setup you ideally need at least 1 ethernet connected node with that ideally being the main Sky Q box. 

[ceejaysix]

Thanks @JimM1 - Superfast, MySky app reports 75.1mbs to hub, if I stand near the hub on Wi-Fi my device normally gets 35-60mbs.

[ceejaysix]

Thanks @Chrisee  - I've tried Powerline, if I just one run one (from router to any minibox on the same power ring) it 'usually' becomes more stable for that one box, but doesn't improve the others. Having tested speed by connecting laptop directly to the Powerline instead of the minibox, I only get 12-15mbs across the Powerline. If I try more than one Powerline link it all falls over.

[ceejaysix]

Thanks @jamesn123 - the Sky engineer didn't mention this, only that (when he added the extended) that were now at max nodes.

Can you not disable the Q mesh altogether, use a more capable mesh with more nodes from another manufacturer, then Ethernet each minibox to a different node on the new mesh? Or is that only for wifi, and TV is only capable of being pushed across the background Q mesh?

I could Powerline / Ethernet the main box and hub, not sure I've tried that, but as above my Powerline speeds aren't great. Maybe worth a shot tho.

[Chrisee]

@ceejaysix you can buy kits at a variety of prices the more expensive ones use all 3 conductors rather than just two and while they dont reach their rated output you can expect at least 30% so 500Mb/s is achievable. If you buy online they can be sent back if they dont work in your home but always plug the adapters into wall sockets.

[jamesn123]

@ceejaysix 

You can disable the mesh but unless the mini boxes are connected via ethernet they will still use wireless transmission for TV functionality. Of course if you decide to ethernet each minibox to a mesh node then thats a different story you may then achieve a more stable connection if the 3rd party system creates a better node connection. 

As for using powerline on your main Q box, from your description in the other post aimed at Chrisee it sounds like your homes electrical wiring is not ideal for powerline. If your only getting 12-15mbps over it then Q will just fall over it needs higher bandwidth than that and low latency & i can imagine your latency isnt low if you only get low speeds over it. 

[ceejaysix]

Thanks @Chrisee and @jamesn123 .

 Sounds like first option is to try a higher end Powerline to link at least the hub and main box. Not convinced this will worry, old house with old wiring in much of the original part - though the hub and main box should be on the same power ring.

If that doesn't work, use a 3rd party mesh - which brings me back to the original question of what is the gold standard mesh that can support 7+ nodes, and what router should I use with it?

[Chrisee]

@ceejaysix Asus Zen mesh apparently supports up,to 9 nodes, TP-Link advise no more than 5 nodes for their Deco but there is no hard limit. 

[ceejaysix]

Hi all,

Thanks again for the help above. I've (finally) done something about it (mainly throwing money at the problem). Caveat the below that it's only been running a couple of days, but so far so (mostly) good.

1. ZenWifi XT12 sat next to each minibox, SR203, and main Q box (six XT12s in all).

2. Turned off wifi broadcast on the SR203 (enable access point, enable WPS, allow broadcast of SSID all disabled). Also changed the SSID to make doubly sure it wasn't broadcasting once the AiMesh was running.

3. Turned off all other Sky devices.

4. Configured XT12s: primary router ethernetted to SR203, others set up as AiMesh nodes and each ethernetted to Q box / miniboxes, whole system in AP mode. Mesh setup was really easy via the Asus Router app, kudos to them on their system. Set SSID and security as per the old Sky wifi to avoid having to reprogram everything that connected to it.

5. Restarted Q box, turned off wifi from hidden menu, reset network settings and let it connect via ethernet automatically.

6. Did same for all miniboxes, following the chain the AiMesh showed the XT12 connecting to each other.

7. Voila! Worked perfectly, all boxes connected, 100% they're running off the XT12s as they die if I unplug the ethernet cables.

So, WiFi coverage is massively improved (not surprising given the number of nodes) - standing near the hub I used to be able to get 35 - 60mbs over wifi to devices but falling away in other areas where devices would have been connecting to the minibox mesh rather than the SR203, now I'm getting minimum 50mbs in all areas and over 60mbs in most (Sky gives me 75mbs to the hub).

TV is now much more reliable - no dropouts at all. However the one slight oddity I get is every now and then the sound disappears on the miniboxes, usually only for a fraction of a second (so not even noticeable at times depending on what you're watching and what's happening on-screen at the time). No freezing / juddering of the picture.

As I'm running the AiMesh in AP mode I don't have any QoS settings to play with. Is there a better way of configuring the above setup (I have no way of running more wired connections that I'm happy with) and/or any idea what may cause the sound loss given the connection seems to be excellent between the nodes?

I do have one node that reports as 'okay' rather than 'great' on its connection, and I may try to improve that with another node in between it and the router node (I can borrow one of the outlying nodes that isn't used much to trial, and if it works buy another XT12 - it's already massive overkill for the size of the house, but hey if it works...

Please bear in mind I'm technically minded but not technically savvy...so layman's terms please!

Thanks for any pointers.

Chris

[mae-3]

@ceejaysix 

If money was no object then selecting Asus nodes that are tri-band with 6Ghz is a better solution (802.11ax wifi 6E or even wifi 7, eg: 6Ghz has many channels available and it has lovely and clean airways up there at that frequency at 160Mhz width, plenty of room and good coverage for multiple nodes for wireless backbones. The Asus ET12 Pro is the range for tri-band 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz & 6Ghz for backbone at 160Mhz width.

[ceejaysix]

Thanks Mae. I did consider the ET12, but after a fair amount of trawling reviews I settled on the XT12 because you can have a dedicated wireless backhaul channel which is better for wireless networking (rather than wired APs). Whereas the ET12 uses 50% of one of its available bands for wireless backhaul and is more suited to wired. I don't pretend to understand the technicalities, but the rationale made some kind of sense.

I was more wondering whether there was anything I could adjust in the current configuration. The XT12s are telling me to upgrade ethernet cables to Cat5e (2.5GE) or newer, which is simple but I don't know will make any difference for TV purposes?

Other than setting the operating mode to AP (is this the right one to use? Or is there a better one?) everything else is default on the mesh, I just hit 'optimise' every now and then and the different nodes sometimes connect in different ways to each other, presumably depending on which signal is strongest at any given time.

Backhaul is set to auto channel, I could fix it to one dedicated channel (5Ghz-2?).

Uplink APs are all set to auto rather than fixing the link from one node to the next.

802.11ax is enabled.

Radio is enabled on all 3 bands (no idea what that means).

DFS channel is enabled on both 5Ghz bands (no idea what that means).

I have an option to enable 160Mhz bandwidth (no idea what that means), but when I turn it on and try to save settings it gives an error "2.4Ghz fronthaul SSID is the same as the backhaul SSID". Can't immediately see a way to change individual SSIDs.

That seems to cover most of the options in the app (there may be more if I access the router itself). I've seen fixing channels mentioned, I would guess I'm currently set on an 'auto' select. Is this worth playing with and how would you know which is best to use?

[mae-3]

@ceejaysix 

With more nodes that are close by and wireless then 6GHz backhaul is better because the 6GHz backhaul isn't impacted by DFS channels (meaning that radar cannot impact signals)..

With DFS channels which are most of the 5GHz band radar is the primary user and home wireless on 5GHz is secondary.; this means if radar is detected then the router must switch itself off or move the channel, so you have a loss of wireless using DFS when the radar is detected or anything that even closely looks like radar which is usually another wireless router in some cases.

The backhaul over 2.5Gbps ethernet will reduce the latency very slightly but is mainly for local use and moving information between the nodes at two-half times faster than 1Gbps ethernet, it requires good cables and I suggest category 7 flat ethernet cables.

The width of the channel the larger the better, eg: 160Mhz allows more traffic the wider the better like a motorway.

Radio on three bands, eg: 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz-1 and 5Ghz-2 for XT12 only 1 of the 5Ghz-2 bands can go wide for backhaul, eg: 160Mhz wide like a motorway.

If you connect the main Asus router to ONT then it needs to be in router mode, and nodes need to be in node mode.