Using ethernet at home.

[Roysky1]

I did not know that - thanks for the information Deb3000 - it really is news to me as I always believed the router secuurity would stop that sort of thing. As they say everyday is a school day.

I am now looking at the suggested Mesh options as they would appear to provide all that I really need in terms of speed and reasonable security. 

[Deb3000]

Yes, your electric wiring connects through the meter and out to a shared supply, of course.  Debatable how much of a risk that actually is.  Your neighbour would have to have the same adapters also with the default key etc.   Wireless, on the other hand, goes through walls but it's weakened.  You would need to be within about 50m to get a connection stable enough to connect to.

If you are part of the techie generation I grew up with, the accepted wisdom was real networks use cables.  You only put wireless in if you can't drill holes for wires in, say, a listed building.  (Not that that stopped us on occasion).  Bite the bullet and put cat 6 cables in.  You won't regret it.

[Roysky1]

Unfortunately as this is a rented property the prospect for drilling holes is not very good despite the fact it is a long term rental - hence initially going the powerline route and considering mesh wifi.. 

[Deb3000]

Just make sure you use a good key then.  Use WPA3, or if still using WPA2, the recommended minimum now is 20 characters length, including upper, lowercase, numbers and symbols.

[Disant2k]

Daft question, but you haven't connected any Sky Q boxes of Minis via Ethernet have you? 

If you have, that may be your issue. The back haul links on Sky Q boxes floods the network with a lot of chatter, and limits overall speed over the wired network. I found this much to my annouance, and was why I replaced all Sky Q routers with a third-party brand.

[Roysky1]

Good question - I don'tthink so (been a while since I set it up) so I will check it out. I think I have plugged ethernet into the main Q box so will check that also. This area is one of the reasons for moving to Sky from TT so need to reconsider all the pints raised in these discussions.

[Me134 · Accepted solution]

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@Roysky1 wrote:

Good question - I don'tthink so (been a while since I set it up) so I will check it out. I think I have plugged ethernet into the main Q box so will check that also. This area is one of the reasons for moving to Sky from TT so need to reconsider all the pints raised in these discussions.

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Skys implementation of wifi for Q and the mini boxes is very proprietary and out of date now, the marketing hype of creating hotspots around the house sounded all well and good (and may work for some) but they don't play well with the newer Max hub which is treated as a 3rd party BB router. The Max hub also likes to aggressively use the higher 5Ghz bands and since it won't allow you to split the 2.4 & 5Ghz bands, tends to cause issues with older tech like Ring doorbells and CCTV cameras.

I would always push for using something like the Deco M4 pods (one for each additional Sky TV box plus the Max hub being used as an ethernet bridge) and disabling the wifi on a Max hub, the main Q box and all mini boxes (each box has to be done separately) and linking them via ethernet cable to either the Decos or the Max hub. Let the Decos handle all wifi and the Q boxes will think they're all connected directly via ethernet.

A 3 pack of Decos M4s costs £110 and if paying via Paypal you can usually get 0% interest over 3 monthly payments. Anyone paying for Sky TV can surely stretch to that cost for just the 3 months? There are other options of course.

Edit: changing the security setting in the MySky app can help with legacy devices from WPA3 to WPA2.