After struggling for months, if not years, with connectivity issues between the Sky Q Mini and Main boxes, I have finally managed to setup a stable and reliable solution. I live in a townhouse separated by concrete floors, so had issues in getting my WiFi signal reliably as well across all floors. Combine that with a busy London neighbourhood with too many WiFi routers and channels in use, I think signal clashing was and is a big problem. I had to go for a Mesh WiFi system - Linksys Velop in my case, with several nodes spread across the house. The Mesh nodes do result in a loss of speed, with none of the satellites able to serve anything better than 70 to 80 Mb, but the coverage is reliable and good - most of the time.
Sky Q also uses a mesh but channels and frequency are very limited, so the mesh is unable to self-correct. In my case, I had the Sky Q main box, 2 Sky Q mini boxes, and a Sky Q extender. I tried all options and had the Sky engineer in as well multiple times to resolve the daily multiple dropouts between the Main and Mini boxes. Frustratingly, the mini would return the status of being connected to the main box (both Sky Q and WiFi) but still show the 'No connection' error on the screen. I don't need to tell you how amazingly frustrating it has all been as you're likely facing the same problem if you're reading this article. No amount of fiddling - with power saving settings, wifi channels etc. was able to solve the problem.
The solution for me was connecting every Sky Q box, main and minis, via Ethernet cable to a Velop node, and disabling completely (via 001 Settings advanced options) the wifi signal of Sky Q - so basically making Sky Q believe it's communicating via Ethernet with each other and the Sky Q wifi mesh is disabled. This has worked like a dream - connection dropouts are gone, the setup is simple, and the lack of Sky Q mesh has reduced the signal collision at home and made my Velop mesh also more reliable. It's Nirvana!!
