Sky max

[P+V+H]

What are the experences with Sky Max?

i recenlty changed my router to sky max,  the existing sky router was old, and fttp is due to arrive this year, so decided to be ready with a WAN connection on the router.

very underwhelmed by its performance, i had a mesh set up using  my sky Q and mini box as repeaters with two additional sky reapeaters to get a signal outside to my connected hot tub. I  had full coverage with a down load speed, on wi fi of around 79mbs.

Very poor coverage with the max. And a down load speed on wifi of under 40mbs, sky sent me a repeater, only one, they say for more they would send an engineer, but signal is above the guarenteed minimun, so have gone with third party items, still a speed under 40mbs. Looks as if the max limits wi fi speeds, sky download  test says speed to router is 79 mps.

all in all very disapointing,

i can see the speed differance on wi fi, sky Q is hard wired  so that is ok. 

have others had the same issues ?

[cookiemonsteruk]

@P+V+H 

Surprised as a sky q user you were able to get sky max with sky q as they use different mesh technologies .  Sky q with sky broadband boost mesh uses airties whilst sky max uses plume mesh technology and should make the transition from one to the other impossible.  Have you requested the sky max pods

[Chrisee]

@P+V+H I had the Wifi Max pack and 2 extenders which I decided not to stick with but that was in the first month when there were major issues with the system firmware. I still have the SR213 hub.

First point the pack is explained here https://www.sky.com/help/articles/sky-wifi-max in practical terms if you have Max and call Sky saying you need an extender Sky post one pod out. If you need more than 1 then a broadband engineer visits and checks the system and can agree to up to 2 more pods. This is actually pretty useful as you get an expert opinion on your wifi set up with signal levels checked. 

The SR213 is a Wifi6 router and can deliver wifi speeds up to 900Mb/s in the immeadiate area if the device also supports wifi6 according to my own tests. Of course speeds drop as you move further away and cannot cover my 3 level home. The system with the pod extenders uses 3 signals which is great in theory as one signal is reserved for back haul traffic from the pods to the hub. That signal uses the 5GHz band and was part of my issues I had as the positioning of the hub and the pods had issues with a retaining wall which blocked direct connection so relying on reflections. The pods also were very unstable frequentky losing the backhaul an issue I know has been sorted since then.

I already had a Deco M4 3 unit set up I had bought when i swapped from Sky Q to Sky Stream to replace the Q box hot spots. I ran a series of tests and while the wifi speed of the Wifi5 M4 system was slower in my main living area it still fully used the 500Mb/s my Ultrafast+ full fibre conection delivers it was faster in the other areas of my home achieving 200Mb/s in every room. This is largely due to the physical location of the satellites and the rather odd set up caused by the layout of my home. Given I owned the Deco units  already and would save the cost of Wifi Max I rejected the new system..Sky let you keep,the SR213 hub.

Whether I would make the same decision today is not certain as the firmware of the SR213 and the pods has been heavily tweaked and most of the connection issues I had have been sorted. If your home is reasonably wifi friendly without thick solid walls and you can position the pods properly the Wifi Max should work well as a triband system and equipped with fast Wifi chips (the pods are Wifi5 only the hub is wifi6) it is suitable for full fibre. The pack offers reasonable parental protection which I dont require.

However every home is different and you may be better buying a third party set up and either runnning it in Access Point mode as I do, in a double NAT config behind a Sky hub or even connected directly to the line asssuming it can authenticate a Sky connection which only some systems can. In the long term this can be cheaper than paying for Wifi Max,

I assume you are aware but for others currently Sky will refuse an order for Wifi Max for anyone with a Sky Q system as the new hubs are not currently compstablecwith SkybQ ninis.