Sky Q Mini boxes as WIFI hotspots

[JimmyLad1974]

Hi

I moved house recently and have been having a few Wi-Fi issues. It is a house built in 1948 with fairly thick brick walls.

I have a main SKY Q box in my lounge, a sky mini box in the kitchen/diner and a second sky mini box in our bedroom. All three boxes were intermittently dropping internet connection.

The main dual band BT router (2.4 GHz and 5GHz) is in our office upstairs and is giving download speeds of circa 350Mbps. 

Yesterday I had an independent broadband guy over who hard wired the BT router via ethernet cable outside and down the wall and straight into the back of the main SKY Q box. He confirmed that the Sky Q box was now receiving speeds of 300 Mbps via the ethernet cable.

He then suggested that we use the mini boxes as Wi-Fi hotspots to boost the coverage across the house and maybe even remove the need for the BT Wi-Fi boosters that I am currently having to use.

I went onto both mini boxes and logged into Settings and pressed 001 on remote which took me to the Network engineers menu. I made sure that the 2.4 GHz Network was set to ON. 

I then went back to the main SKY Q box and went to Settings, Setup, Network, Advanced Settings and turned the Wi-Fi hotspots to ON. I followed the screens through and had already checked that my BT router had WPA2 security enabled. It came up with a message that the sky Wi-Fi hotspots had been turned on.

When returning to the kitchen/diner I switched off my BT Wi-Fi booster and then checked my download speed via my phone and I was still only getting 15Mbps download speeds despite having set the Sky mini box as a hotspot and standing right next to it! Having spoken to a Sky Engineer he said that the mini boxes can provide up to 200Mbps as hotspots.

I am at a bit of a loss now.

Can anyone suggest why the speeds are so poor and have I done something wrong?

I am not technically minded at all so if you are kind enough to offer an advice, please do it in layman’s terms for me!

Thanks in advance.

[TimmyBGood]

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@JimmyLad1974 wrote:

Having spoken to a Sky Engineer he said that the mini boxes can provide up to 200Mbps as hotspots.

I am at a bit of a loss now.

Can anyone suggest why the speeds are so poor and have I done something wrong?

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'up to' would be the crucial detail there: any hotspot can only pass on the bandwidth it is receiving.  If each Mini box has barely enough connection to work itself (about 3Mbs for HD playback) then it cannot improve the connectivity for other devices: the same basic physics applies to them as to any other wireless client device.

[TimmyBGood]

@JimmyLad1974 

It's also worth noting that while the 'Q Mesh' was reasonably advanced for its day, realistically that day was in 2015, and the Q hardware was never intended or specified to sling Ultrafast bandwidth around a subscriber address, particularly where the environment isn't conducive to WiFi anyway.  A mesh topology (when nodes are optimally positioned) can reduce distance between source and client, but it isn't magic.

[SamDog2]

As far as I am aware Skiy minin Boxes will only act as access points if you have Sky broadband.

[TimmyBGood]

@SamDog2 

That was correct at launch, but the function has been available on broadband from other ISPs for several years.  It does however require manual activation.

https://www.sky.com/help/articles/wifi-hotspots