Combining skyQ and sky+ boxes in the household

[Driver12345]

This is a difficult question and even the help desk at sky cannot seem to clarify for me, so here goes. I live in a remote area and have a very poor broadband signal at times, I can be disconnected from my broadband for up to a week or sometimes more and occasionally Netflix struggles to play on my tv. At the moment I have aSkyHd+ box and a second upstairs which is directly attached to my sky satellite dish.My question is if I got skyQ downstairs could I keep my old sky+ had box upstairs as when there is no broadband I could still watch sky upstairs as my understanding of the SkyQ mulitiroom box is that it work's wirelessly from the main box, so in the event of no broadband the second box would not work. Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this question. 

[SKY1992bf]

@Driver12345  The simple answer is you can't have sky + hd and sky Q boxes running on the same account at the same time 

it's one or the other 

[Mark39 · Accepted solution]

@Driver12345 you could keep your Sky+ box, but it would only be capable of receiving the free to air Freesat channels - you wouldn't be able to use it to receive subscription channels like Sky One, or watch recordings from your Sky Q box, for the reasons @SKY1992bf posted. Essentially it would work in the same way as any non-Sky Freesat receiver.

If you decide to go,ahead and switch to Sky Q be sure to tell Sky that you want to keep your existing Freesat receiver (your Sky+box) and ask them to fit a hybrid LNB. Otherwise they'll fit a standard Sky Q LNB which won't be compatible with your Sky+ box.

[TimmyBGood]

---

@Driver12345 wrote:

 my understanding of the SkyQ mulitiroom box is that it work's wirelessly from the main box, so in the event of no broadband the second box would not work.

---

Keep in mind that 'broadband' and 'wifi' are not the same thing: there's still a wireless signal coming from your router when the external internet connection has failed and the router itself is still passing internal traffic and doing DHCP.

In theory a Q Mini 'should' be able to work for live television (received by the main Q box over the satelllite dish and retransmitted to the Mini using built-in Sky WiFi) without external broadband, but in practice I think it will fail to initialise properly after detecting no internet is available.

[Driver12345]

Thankyou for your help, it's a lot clearer now.