Zenwifi and Q mini box advice

[Nyoung2]

Hi all

I was looking for sine advice around third party routers and Q mini boxes.

idwally I'm looking to upgrade my sky router to a Zenwifi system (I believe I need the XT8 version.

Current set up

Sky superset fibre to premise 

Sky riyree

Sky Q main

Sky Q mini

Skky Q bedroom

Sky extender 

I've noticed relatively poor wireless performance on devices and want to move away from the Sky Q router to something that'll perform better. What I observe us devices jumping between the router, extender and hotspots the minis create which is sub optimal. For context wired connection is fine so I'm satisfied connection to the house is fine.

So I'd ideally be replacing the Sky router and extender with 2 Zenwifi (or other) units.

Due to location and wiring it isn't viable to wire any of the Sky kit (which would likely solve many a problem) so I'm having to think a little outside the box. Similarly if I could just turn the minis off creating a hotspot that'd also solve many problems but I need the Wi-Fi on so they talk and connect and strangely there's no option to disable hotspot but allow the boxes to talk wirelessly.

So my question is if I ukgeade can I keep my set up in the same configuration and will the Q mini's still work wirelessly.

Based on what I've read the answer is yes the Q'a will still talk, but what I'm unsure about is if they'll still broadcast a hotspot.

At the moment I can't even change the 5Ghz channel on the minis without it changing for the router. But I understand that when the main box connects to Wi-Fi it does so over 2.4 and then the boxes talk to one another over 5Ghz.

So my theory was if I do that, I could connect to Wi-Fi set up the Q minis and change the sky mesh channel so they talk over that. And my hips is they then want try and extend the Wi-Fi of a third party router, which I could have set to a different channel and that way avoid the meshes clashing.

Am I on the right track, and has anybody got a similar set up that can give me some steer?

I know wiring/power line would simplify but the problem cane to light after wall mounting kit etc etc so it's out if scope for now, and really I want to improve wireless performance for other duvuces.

I don't particularly want to use the Zen in access point mode either I'm looking for a solution to replace.

Although one thought I did have was cable the zen as the lens et router and plug the sky router into that. Let the sky stuff continue to run in that (and change channel) and connect everything else to Zen. Id like to avoid double nat on devices connected to zen.

any help would be very welcomed.

@cookiemonsteruk  I know you're a go to ASUs man. Not necessarily a zen user but perhaps coild guve some steer on the idea as a concept? 

[Nyoung2]

@mae-3 I've also tagged you I hope you don't mind as I see you may be the zen master I need here !

[Chrisee]

@Nyoung2 unless you hard wire the Q mini boxes you cannot disable their hotspots. Q minis require a wifi feed from your main Q box. In the absence of a Sky hub the main Q box acts as the source of thst signal. The main box connects to the 2.4GHz band of your new system and radiates a 5GHz signal for your Q minis to pick up. Thst signal uses a Sky SSID and can only be joined by Sky Q boxes and boosters. 

The most common issue people face is interference between the Sky 5GHz.signal and their main wifi network as they often are using over lapping channel ranges. By default Q boxes use ch36 with a 80MHz bandwidth which will interfere with ch36 to ch52. The best solution is to set your new system to use a higher range but that is not always possible. There is a setting in the Q box's engineers menu.- accessed by going to settings entering 0,0.1 before select - to use either half of thst range by choosing one of the two 40MHz bandwidth options.

What many people do is where they have multiple wifi satellite units is to hard wire the Q minis to those and disable the Sky wifi. 

[Nyoung2]

@Chrisee Thanks! 

I was aware of the settings.  Naively what I thought I could do is change the 5Ghz band in the engineers menu and have my sky either operate on a different on. So minis talk at a different freq to that of the router.

But I noticed changing it in the engineers menu changes it on the sky router also and there's no way of stopping that.

So hypothetically if I install new zen system, Sky Q main connects to zen by 2.4 and sky Q main and mini talk over 5Ghz.

Althoigh I can't turn off hot spot mode on them, if the wireless 5Ghz channel is different to that of the Zen it should make the access points redundant anyway? So whilst in theory they're transmitting they shouldn't conflict with the zen so devices on the Zen shouldn't 'jump' about in the way they are at present..

Am I on the right line there? It is a shame sky limit the control as it makes it harder to eliminate problems so I'm hoping changing kit may help! 

[Chrisee]

@Nyoung2 making a change on any Sky Q box will  change all of them but you were talking about replacing the hub with a third party router so that shouldn't matter.

You will only get interference if the "Zen wifi" and the Sky mesh are using the same channels/frequecies the 2 should be fine if using different ranges if using ethernet is impossible.

Q was designed only to operate with the dedicated Sky hubs but was re-engineered after launch to allow 3rd party routers (the rumour was that Ofcom weren't happy) but there are compromises in the way that had to be done so it has always been a bit of a cludge. Sky's new Glass/Stream TVservice is free of these compromises as the units are simple wifi clients.