Sky Max Hub, as good as it gets?

[boab400]

We left our previous provider, at a previous address to join Sky for full fibre at our new house. We chose the sky max WiFi deal and saw how much cheaper it was , feeling like that would be just as good but less expensive.

We quickly realised the WiFi wasn't strong enough to reach upstairs. So we added on a max pod and much resolved the problem. Since then, we have noticed unusual behaviours from the equipment. From running tests both through the My Sky app and 3rd party sites/apps we can see the speed to the hub varies dramatically through the day/night. 

In addition to this, every couple of weeks we have to restart the hub and repair the max pod, due to WiFi grinding to a crawl on all connected devices. Sky say that they can fix this with more pods, but that doesn't really resolve the issue with the existing equipment. Is anyone else aware of problems with the Sky Max Hub/Pod arrangement with their smart home devices as well?

It seems that you get what you pay for, for any extra £20 pcm with the previous provider you can get WiFi 7 now, which promises far greater WiFi in each room, while Sky's equipment seems sub par in comparison.

The bottlenecking and inconsistencies experienced since the contract started have tested our patience and resolve, but we can't justify paying for 3rd party equipment if we can just wait until the contract is up and leave for any other ISP offering more up to date hardware, that may or may not work better for us.

[Chrisee]

@boab400 interesting post which I largely agree with. The WiFi Max hub does seem to suffer from variable speeds according to multiple reports. We know it uses an "intelligent" system to optimise performance and the basic hardware is a development of the Xfinity system Sky's parent company, Comcast, use in the US which they are required to use. The pods are based on the Plume Super Pods which gets decent reviews but in my experience aren'y brilliant. Sky are being quite uncommunicative which isnt unusual but I dont think the ir engineers think WiFi Max is that  good. 

Adding more pods can help, as they should improve the wifi mesh network in your home. Getting  a second pid usually requires a visit by a broadband engineer which should help,as they will advise on placement of the units.

Refarding upgrading to WiFi7 at some point Sky will inevitably launch a similar model but honestly it is highly unlikely that it will magically make WiFi wonderful. In practice devices that can use WiFi7 are pretty rare. WiFi6 is amply fast enough for the current Gigabit product indeed WiFi5 can deliver 600Mb/s. The fixation with speed is misguided stability and latency are just important but largely overlooked. Most apps cannot use 100Mb/s let alone 900Mb/s a Netflix block buster in UHD/Dolby Vision etc uses roughly 30Mb/s online gaming rarely exceeds 10Mb/s. The only activity that gets faster is downloads but even those are often throttled by the server's owners. 

My own solution is a pretty aged 3 unit WiFi5 system that delivers from 500Mb/s in our main living area dropping to just under 200Mb/s in the most distant rooms. It provides rock steady video streaming and decent latency (under 15ms). Cost me under £100  My Sky Max hub just acts as a router as I dont use its wifi. I tried the pods and they were less stable and not worth the extra cost in my opinion.

[boab400]

I have also noticed quite a bit of lag/delay when gaming and signed into the router gateway to realise that UPnP was disabled by default. Is this because the firewall on this Sky Max Hub is set to a really low security level by default. Or just an oversight? I'm aware that I can open/forward ports for devices manually but shouldn't really need to, or at least with any other hubs up till now haven't needed to. That is because they have all had it enabled by default. It has definitely improved response time on all devices having it toggled on now.

I would dread to try and seek help from Sky agents on how to manually open ports, they seem to know less about these devices than we do. There was a guide for setting it up I used when I had a NAS connected but it failed and is no longer used on our home LAN. By choosing a simpler UI it seems everything has become more complicated and less supported by Sky themselves.

[Anonymous]

Trust me mate, your English is way better than the sassenachs, so nothing to apologise for.