Sky Q Boxes draining network bandwidth

[pbirah]

Hi,

I have sky q main and mini boxes dotted around the house on cat 6 cabling with gigabit unmanaged switches.

Recently I had Sky Fibre 900 installed and noticed that I was only getting ~280mb from speedtests via ethernet, whereas wifi at the router was getting me ~400mb. Hardwiring at the SR203 showed I was getting 880mb. This led me to beleive an issue with my switches or cabling perhaps.

After much diagnosis and testing cables and switches and isolating the network areas, I slowly managed to achieve the 880mb around the home.

The only way I was able to achieve this was to unplug each and every Sky Q Main and Mini box from the switch resulting in them no longer on my home network. This has now resulted in the minis no longer working since they are not picking up the connectivity to the main box.

All cabling round home is 90% cat 6 with a couple of runs of cat 5e. All patch cables are either cat 5e or cat 6. I have rulled out cabling and patch cables as the issue.

The moment I plug any one of the Main or 3 minis back into the home network, imemdiately, anywhere in the home regardless of the segment, my speed tests drop to 280mb from 880mb. Interestingly at the Sky SR203 router from a different port to the slowed down home network, I still see speeds of 880mb.

Any thoughts on what can be done here ? I have a suspicion I may need to replace all of my Netgear GS308 unmanaged switches with managed versions and set up VLANS segragating all the way back to the Sky broadband outer.

Thanks,

Pav

[TimmyBGood]

@pbirah 

Unfortunately that's been noted before in this forum, and given the vintage of Q (effectively now a decade old design, so long pre-dating domestic FTTP bandwidth) it's unlikely to be addressed by Sky.

[Chodley]

They spam the hell out of the network with broadcast packets, unfortunately. A vlan might help. I put my Q behind a 100Mb switch and a (wifi 5) mesh node which I think throttles it effectively by pure luck.

[deroo]

Hello!  Same issue here. Had Gigafast installed today and whilst carried out some basic speedtests I found the speed to drop to aroun 270-280Mbps. Then I began the task of troubleshooting every cable and switch. Eventually I doscivered that unplugging my Q main box the speed increased. My home switches are unmanaged and despite having a couple of managed switches available, I don't want to have to use them as they do consume more power and are bigger than the unamanaged switches.

For now, I've had to leave the Q main box connected via WiFi. The SR203 router is also not WiFi 6 capable, so we'll never see more than 500Mbps over wifi even if you're standing next to the router. 

Sky are unlikely to fix this, as I too have sniffed the network and see tons of broadcast traffic. I expect that now this traffic is going ove the WiFi bands it will kill that connection too! Might need to invest in dedicated Wifi APs like Google or Eero. I'm not switching to Glass, I still like the thought of retaining TV if the internet goes down.

[Chodley]

Having my box hardwired to a mesh node (bt wholehome) seems to suppress whatever it does spamming the network as I only have unmanaged switches and get 950+ on speedtest. I also have a basic Netgear ethernet-only router, don't know if that is a factor.

[nrynryuk]

Literally just discovered this exact issue after thinking we were being efficient using ethernet for as many devices as we could!

SkyQ into gbit ethernet switch - whole network crawls, Sky GBit fibre slugs at 120mbit/second on ethernet (WiFi seems OK?).

SkyQ ethernet straight into the router (Sky Hub 4.2) and all works fine - ethernet downloads hit 800mbits/second on the PS5 when I tested.

Quite why plugging it into the router directly stops the issue, I'm not sure - maybe this keeps the SkyQ broadcast traffic within the router ports?

As yet, we can't leave it connected this way as the cables from SkyQ to our router are running across rooms and through doorways...but at least I know the device causing the problem!

[deroo]

Yeah I think the ports on the router keep the traffic from broadcasting. If you use a switch as an access point then you're basically screwed (if you've got more than 100mbit internet speeds). 

For now, I've had to revert to the sky nodes being on WiFi only. I've installed a TP link mesh and use that for WiFi and keep the Sky router's WiFi for the Sky Q boxes and my smart devices. 

At least now you know, but it's still frustrating. 

[Zipmeister]

Glad I found this, just for the reassurance I am not the only one! Had Full Fibre 900 installed last week, been trying to work out why the speeds were not great, so I've been debugging today and eventually landed on the SKy Q Minis plugged into switches is killing the speed! At least I know now and can get them all on the less reliable wifi!