Sky Q Wi-Fi Hotspot

[PVD1878]

I have a Sky router (SR203) and a Sky-Q television box.

The Q box acts as a wi-fi hotspot generating a truly meshed wi-fi signal throughout my home.

Any device that latches onto my router gets 100% of the available download speed (about 150 mb/s)

Any device that latches onto my Q box only gets 50% of that download speed.

I have disabled the Q box's hotspot function in its settings but it is still transmitting its wi-fi signal.

Apparently, only customers with 3rd party routers are allowed to disable the Q box's hotspot function.

I do not want or need a meshed wi-fi signal.  I live in a modestly sized house and the signal from my SR203 router is more than adequate.

I want all of my devices to have access to 100% of the download speed for which I am paying a small fortune every month.

Sky need to address this. It is totally unacceptable.

[Chrisee · Accepted solution]

@PVD1878 The onky way to disable the hotspot is to connect the Q box by ethernet and turn off its wifi completely if ethernet is impractical powerline adapters work quite well.

Sky's Q boxes were designed around 2015 and have what is now a fairly basic wifi mesh system. Sky do not publish any info on how the system works but the wifi hotspots seem only able to offer 200Mb/s give or take irrespective of backhaul speed. Obviously that is ample for the vast majority of applications a domestic system will use. It is highly unlikely Sky will update the Q TV system as they appear to be moving away from satellite to their new streaming platform with Sky Stream and Sky Glass.

[TechmanagerMal]

@Chrisee "the wifi hotspots seem only able to offer 200Mb/s give or take"

mine appears to offer 433Mbps upstairs but its not measureable on speedtest.net?

[Chrisee]

@TechmanagerMal assuming the Sky Q box is operating over wifi not particularly surprised by that. Any system operating as a wifi repeater has to communicate both with the device and back to the hub and the Q boxes cannot do both simultaenously. Newer mesh systems can use mutiple frequencies etc

[PVD1878]

So it looks like I will need to run a cable from the Q-box in my lounge to the router which is in an upstairs bedroom.

What a faff.

It's very annoying that I can't disable the Q-box's unwanted and unneccesary hotspot without turning off its WiFi completely.

Ah, well.

Where's my drill? 😔

[PVD1878]

Job done.
CAT6 from upstairs Router into downstairs Q-Box and Wi-Fi disabled on Q-Box..

Speed has more than doubled downstairs.

I win. 😀

[SKYQwSKYfiber]

@PVD1878 bit late if you have already patched with cable, but here is another method for anyone else 😉

I had the same issue after I got SKY fiber broadband, had EIR before with ethernet cable straight into SKY Q box and never had the issue of unwanted SKY wifi hot spots !

Tried resting network a few times, then rang SKY to ask them to turn off wifi hotspot via remote login (as it kept switching back on for some reason), no help at all. Found the following solution via secret menu on the SKY Q box (screenshot below)....

• Press the ‘Home’ button on your Sky remote control

• Scroll down to ‘Settings’

• When you arrive at ‘Settings’ please do not press the enter/select button

• Enter the number sequence 001 on your remote and then press the enter/select button

• You will now enter the secret engineering menu with a message: “These settings should only be changed if you’ve been instructed to by Sky”

• Select the ‘Network’ menu

• Now you have the options to separately turn 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz wireless on or off

• turn off both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz and select ‘Confirm’

• exit back out to the main SKY menu 

The SKY Q box should now stop broadcasting those useless wifi hotspots, though when I checked the Network settings it listed the name of my 2.4GHz network. I have a SKY Q Mini Box in the next room, and thought I wouldnt work anymore cause I cut the wifi, but to my surprise it worked perfectly (so far !) so I can only assume the SKY Q box wifi is only for the hot spots.

[SKYQwSKYfiber]

post script ..... I only watch TV on the SKY Q Mini Box for maybe 1 hour a day, so I have it switched off at the wall most of the time. When I turned it on I discovered it too was broadcasting wifi hotspots, and as the SKY Q Mini Box connects to the main SKY Q Box via wifi I would have to leave one of the channels swicthed on.

I decided I could live with the  2.4 GHz channel being duplicated sometimes, so swithced off the  5 GHz wireless via the  the secret engineering menu. However, this caused the box to lose signal completly, so I had to switch the 5 GHz channel back on (and switched off  2.4 GHz)  then reconnected to the  main SKY Q box.

Bit of a dissapointment as I wanted to leave the 5 GHz channel completely clear for everything else and just use the 2.4 GHz channel for my personal phone but will just have to lump it for the few hours a week the SKY Q Mini Box isnt switched off at the mains. 

Moral of the story, SKY should ship their equipment to have wifi hotspots turned OFF by default and also fix the issue where even if the user switches them off via the options menu they still start broadcasting regardless !

[TimmyBGood]

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@SKYQwSKYfiber wrote:

Moral of the story, SKY should ship their equipment to have wifi hotspots turned OFF by default

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That was never going to happen: the automatic 'hotspot' functionality when used with Sky Broadband was a key point of Q television marketing on release in early 2016 (long before other 'mesh' systems became easily available)

[SKYQwSKYfiber]

@TimmyBGood  fair enough but its a major annoyance with me when functionality is taken away from a user. In fact,  a big reason for switching from EIR was their newest router had  2.4 GHz and 5 GHz broadcasting on the same SSID with no way to split (although this is the SKY default there is an option on the admin page to splt & give unique names), the effect of this was my laptop farthest away from the router couldnt decide which frequency to lock onto as the signal strength went up & down during the day slowing the browser speed to a crawl 50% of the time, very frustrating !

[TimmyBGood]

@SKYQwSKYfiber 

Perhaps worth noting the new Sky Max Hub cannot split bands either: this seems to be intrinsic to getting the better performance out of WiFi 6

[Daveyb1974]

Fair enough they are shipped with Hotspots On as default, but if Sky allow Third Party routers the option to turn hotspots off on the Minis, why not give this option to sky router users. My minis cap speeds around 170mb when I have Sky 500mb fibre. If I turn them off completely then wifi speed jumps to 350-400mb. Importantly for WiFi gaming ping and latency improve as now forcibly connecting to the router. If Sky will not give all users the option to turn mini hotspots off in the new world of FTTP speeds then I will have to switch to another Fibre provider 

[simon194]

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@TimmyBGood wrote:

@SKYQwSKYfiber 

Perhaps worth noting the new Sky Max Hub cannot split bands either: this seems to be intrinsic to getting the better performance out of WiFi 6

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I'm more inclined to think it's a Plume thing because Wifi 6 devices only support the 2.4 GHz band for backwards compatibility with IoT devices. Wifi 6e is a bit different because it uses the 6 GHz band to add extra capacity.

The Wifi 6 access points I use for the wifi bridge between floors in my house  are capable of over 2 Gbps and will only create a bridged connection on the 5 GHz band.