Sky Broadband attenuates/drops around 9PM

[Brucebruce]

Hi - new to Sky broadband (near 2 weeks in) - superfast - get 60/70mbps daytime and late evening as advertised, but speed not reliable around 7pm and again 9pm.  All devices drop out (phone, PC, sky puck) - but concerning as we don't have an old landline anymore, and we need wifi signal for mobile, never mind the loss of internet

Have a brand new Sky Q puck and SR203 model hub.

Old Plusnet fibre broadband did not suffer this drop in speed and very very rarely had to suffer the spinning wheel of death, just provided a decent 60mbps whenever checked. Maybe Sky are more aggressive with throttling back signal at peak times, but surely not to the extent they totally kill the signal.

Have I made a dreadful mistake moving to Sky? I'm just within the 14 day cancellation period, so I can still revert to old supplier. Or are there some possible hub settings I could try?

[mae-3]

@Brucebruce 

Can you post the router stats, post at top of the forum that explains how to post those states.

[Brucebruce]

Hi,

Router stats from approx 21.10 . Wifi network channel 36 @ 80Mhz.

Some devices on the network are connecting via an ORBI RBK50 mesh. Maybe it meeds a firmware upgrade to maintain combatibility with the new hub (though it seems strange the drop out is always around 7pm and 9pm - happened again this evening at those times BST) 

Router Statistics

System Up Time: 298:50:32

Port                          Status TxPkts        RxPkts                    Collision Pkts     Tx b/s     Rx b/s                        Up Time

WAN                        MER       4235727_   109204962_     0                            1231384_ 8108889_               258:21:06

LAN                          Up        100118578_      28346533_  0                            5766312_    130231_               298:50:32

WLAN (2.4 GHz) Up           5868842_         2882241_   0                                      743                18                 298:48:53

WLAN (5 GHz)     Up          28219791_       19038145_   0                                          0                  0                 298:48:53

---

Broadband Link       Downstream                                                 Upstream

Connection Speed   79999 kbps                                                 19366 kbps

Line Attenuation D1(12.5 dB) , D2(28.6 dB) , D3(43.4 dB) U0(3.3 dB) , U1(25.5 dB) , U2(35.6 dB)

Noise Margin 5.9 dB                                                                           6.0 dB

[mae-3]

@Brucebruce 

The router stats show a solid working broadband line with 80Mbps downstream and 19.4Mbps upstream that has been working for over 10 days.

The issue you have will be related to the wireless on the Orbi mesh, and it is likely that in your local area at the times specified, the radar system is operational on the 5Ghz DFS wireless channels the Orbi users for the wireless mesh.

Try changing the 5 GHz wireless channel on the Orbi wireless mesh to fix the issue.

[Chrisee]

@Brucebruce I can put your mind at rest around throttling which Sky dont do - if they did try the speed test sites would pick it up. A possible cause is contention ie too many people trying to use a limited bandwidth at busy times but outside very isolated temporary issues with specific exchanges that is not an issue these days as the back haul networks are specified to support full fibre connections. 

As @mae-3 posts it is more likely a local issue in your network but you can test by running a controlled speedtest on a device connected by a direct Ethernet cable to the hub when other devices are not connected. That avoids variability that wifi is always prone to.

[Brucebruce]

Thanks Team, appreciate the responses which I shall act on. I'll switch the Orbi frequency and I will also separately try switching off the 'Enable wifi access point' on the Sky Hub (all my devices connect to Orbi rather than the Sky hub but it eliminates any conflicts in my property, and it was mentioned as a problem in a couple of other posts). 

Agree the stats look OK (to an untrained eye like me!) - I also looked at syslog for any interesting enries - I see a lot of 'Lease renewed) entries every 20-30 minutes - is that normal? - and a few NTP requests otherwise nothing surprising

eg  2023_10_08 06:22:22 syslog: Lease renewed 3600 ip (etc)

Just one point about the conflicting/competing radar traffic on the Orbi frequency - until I moved to Sky 2 weeks ago I had none of this hassle with the plusnet hub and the Orbi mesh, and any neighbours are pretty distant right now (like 100s of miles away) and microwave cooking was not taking place during these dropouts - so the only real change that I can see to the environment is the Sky BB/hub element.

I will try the recommendations made in your posts, and let you know midweek how I get on.

Cheers for now.

[mae-3]

@Brucebruce 

The lease renewing about every 30 minutes is normal.

The Orbi should have a log that will highlight whether the radar is the issue and radar takes priority on DFS channels so the wireless mesh must back off and stop transmitting.

[Brucebruce]

Hi, checking Orbi admin and logs showed backhaul status to Orbi satellite was 'poor'. Changing 2.4ghz channel from 'auto' to 1 improved status to 'good'. Will leave this set for tonight and see if there is any difference.

Thanks again for your help. I think you have all contributed sufficient to give me something to work on, and am happy to give positive feedback to Sky!

[Chrisee]

@Brucebruce If you have a windows laptop or an Android device download a useful free app called Wifi Analyzer which shows what wifi networks are within range with their signal strength and channel. Two networks on the same or adjacent channel will interfere if the signal is strong enough. This changes quiet frequently so while Ch1 may be better one day doesnt mean it will remain the best.