Sky wifi sucks

[Skydisplay01]

Maybe you can shed light on my situation . . . @KJBoylan

Speed from ethernet LAN is around 35 Mbps most of the time. But if I try to connect on my phone or laptop via WiFi first thing on the morning there is practically no connection at all - maybe 0.5 Mbps - even a few meters from the router !!
With a WiFi analyser, I can see there are no other users nearby or on my channel.

This seems to sort itself out after a while, although I haven't figured out why . . and then it averages around 25 Mbps.
Anything to explain this erratic behaviour of the WiFi . . . (LAN connection is consistently at 35Mbps all the time)

We recently got a new (basic model) router from Sky.

[JPR007]

@Skydisplay01 There isn't really much to explain to it to be honest, other than welcome to the reality of WiFi...

Ethernet is doing exactly what it does best, giving you the full available speed of your connection all of the time, and WiFi is doing its thing of being as useful as a chocolate teapot, but teasing you with the carrot of convenience 🤣 

The standard Q hub (ER115) is not known for being great for WiFi performance to start with, mostly because of it orientation which was a marketing department decision rather than the tech teams decision...
I would double check which WiFi band your device is connecting via, especially the laptop.

It maybe worth splitting the WiFi bands to ensure your devices are using 5GHz rather than 2.4GHz, but if you have devices like iPhones and iPads they can use both bands at the same time so you shouldn't really need too, but it's worth a go. 

Even with strong signal, wifi can just be slow in general, and depending on which devices you have, it has to run at the speed of the slowest device. A favourite is all these so called "smart" devices which generally have chips from the 1980's in, or so it seems. Often if people remove these from the network suddenly speeds jump on other devices.

Don't forget as well that WiFi varies like the weather...people laugh, but it's true.
It is a radio transmission after all, so it gets affected by lots of environmental things, including interference, same as a satellite signal, same as freeview signal. It also gets slower and slower as the number of devices increases, as the airwaves get more congested.

Just because it's worked fine for the last however many days/weeks/months, doesn't mean it will continue too. 

[Sat7890]

I called today to complain and was told it was because I have too many devices. I have superfast broadband because of this and of course I have too many devices because I have three children and one person working from home!  Having to use 4G on my phone all the time in my own home 😡

[JPR007]

@Sat7890 That is usually low level tech support remark is usually a load of rubbish so i wouldn't listen to that. What is your exact issue? If you start a new thread describing your problem and post your router stats this will help the forum to see where the issue may lie🤓

[maggieMT]

Ever since we had sky installed, the wifi has been rubbish. we have had numerous conversations on the phone and more engineers come to the house than we care to remember, and the wifi is still rubbish. We really have had every conversation that you can possibly have, and what we have found is every technical person has their own idea on how the system works, we had an engineer out again just two days ago and all he did was try each box in each room, look at his little diagram of the network on his ipad and said everything looks ok, he said for some reason he cannot see the boosters as we have two of them and said he thinks they are the problem, so turned them off, i said we had the same problem before we had any boosters, he said unless you want us to move in and monitor whats going on, givea couple of weeks and see what happens. I even said to him everything in the house that uses the wifi complains about the wifi, and i used my Ring doorbell and security lights as an example, these systems give you an RSSI value for signal strength, ours is 76 and the router is less than three meters away, the engineers response was, ring are rubbish.  These people really are not interested. what we plan to do is stop sky and go to a company that is more willing to help, sky have had enough chances.

[TimmyBGood]

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@maggieMT wrote:

 These people really are not interested. what we plan to do is stop sky and go to a company that is more willing to help.

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To be fair, no ISP is particularly good at WiFi: it's an area they should never have got involved with.  Realistically they all depend on auto-configured hardware as anything else (particularly home visits) is likely to cost more than their very slim profit margin allows for.

[qprdude]

Same here. The last 3 months or so it has been getting worse. I've checked for problems but none reported. (Obviously wrong). " no Internet connection" several times a day, on various devices. Switched router off and on, but no difference. Sky are by no means the cheapest option so we'll probably be moving on as it is getting worse. We don't have Sky TV, just free anytime calls and Sky Broadband. £35  for a poor service and we mostly use our mobile phones as the deal is unlimited calls and texts plus 5Gb data. Basically, we pay £35 for a crap BB service.  Anyone surprised that we want to leave?

[TimmyBGood]

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@qprdude wrote:

I've checked for problems but none reported. (Obviously wrong). "  

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That 'check' is on broadband to the address, not WiFi from the Hub, which, as we are constantly reiterating in this forum, is not the same thing.

[brianholt]

@qprdude if you post your router stats we can see if its a line problem. If it is then switching suppliers wont make a difference. What did sky say when you reported your issue ? 

[Mas2001]

At least you're a Sky employee who identifies themselves. The way some people are shilling for Sky and claiming not to be employees is embarassing. BTW my Sky wifi is crap and no amount of calls to Sky will fix it. As a company you have zero interest. First chnace I get I will be off. Awful service and zero help. 

[West335]

It is shocking this person is right. Its not just WiFi problems I have everything wired and it cuts out often especially at night. Speeds reading 79mbps and showing no issues. When you come from another service provider to this its incredibly annoying. I think there's clearly a firmware issue that needs adressing. Really don't blame people venting it's incredibly rediculous. It's quite a common issue too from what I'm seeing. People are going to get angry when they pay for something that doesn't work 

[JPR007]

@West335 What is it that cuts out, the WiFi or the broadband connection as they're 2 different things?

Some downtime overnight in the early hours is a fact of life, no internet connection guarantees 100% uptime. If it's dropping constantly (the internet light), then it's a line fault, which needs Openreach intervention. If you post your router stats these can provide an indication of an unhealthy line.

A common thing is that Sky Q boxes go into a deep sleep mode between 2-5am, causing partial WiFi loss if the boxes are used as hotspots. 

[West335]

That's the thing there are no lights out or anything but I constantly get errors on my xbox saying you need to connect to the Internet and that's hard wired. Downloads don't seem to be a problem though its mainly streaming and game loading when they need to connect the the net. My phone cuts out all the time and that's on WiFi. It's baffling me to be honest, I've tried splitting bands etc to no avail cos I thought smart bulbs might interfere or something but I've tried turning them off and it doesn't help. I appreciate what your saying but I had the same speed with Vodafone and absolutely no problems. Both work through openreach so I'm really not sure what's going on. Disney plus is the biggest nightmare to get working and cuts out constantly although I'm not sure if that's a Disney issue but again Disney worked fine with Vodafone. It's just seems very strange to me. I wish id known about night time drop outs cos I'm knockturnal and again never noticed a problem with other providers

[West335]

Sorry I'll post my stats when I'm home just at work right now 

[West335]

Sorry one more thing cos I can't figure out how to edit comments. I have sky plus HD because I'm on a communal system and the housing association won't allow them to sort sky q out