SKY T.V

JohnBoyUK · September 25

Damn it!

Redvaliant · September 25

JohnBoyUK said:

Damn it!

You can but it will cost an extra fiver a month.

SE9toDA2 · September 25

Are all your switches capable of same speed ?

you might be bottlenecking if one of the switches runs at a lower speed.

Rob7Lee · September 25

JohnBoyUK said:

Hex said:

JohnBoyUK said:

Rob7Lee said:

The minis connect over WiFi by default even if a wire is connected, change the setting to wired. I’d need to look at my settings, but from memory you need to turn off the 2.4ghz on the mini via the engineers menu, or may have been the main box.

is the mini connected to the router or main Q box? And do you have sky broadband?

Yes, thats right. Engineer menu, turn off all the wifi, still hasn't made the slightest bit of difference unfortunately.

Hex said:

robinofottershaw said:

I would also be interested if anyone has experience of Sky Stream. We also have 1 main Sky Q box and 3 mini boxes with 2 TVs on the ground floor and 2 in the basement.

Our wifi provider is Gigaclear who are the only supplier of fibre to the premises in our village. Our house is a 16 year old Cotswold stone property with block and beam concrete floors and, despite have ethernet installed when the house was built, it is still a challenge to retain connectivity between the mini boxes and the main box. We did have an independent engineer install a new network router and wire Wireless Access Points into several of our ethernet sockets a year ago when we switched to Gigaclear which initially seemed to help. We also had a Sky engineer switch the 3 mini box settings from 2.4 to 5 Ghz which also seemed to help for a while (keeping the main box at 2.4 Ghz to retain connectivity with the incoming Gigaclear FTP). However, 50% of the time we switch on one of the 3 TVs connected to a mini box we have to go through the reconnection routine. The Sky engineers are loath to change anything else with our network setup and the independent engineer is coming again next week to have a look at it again.

The last time a Sky engineer came he did suggest it might be better for us to switch to Sky Stream as he thought the stone and concrete construction of the house didn’t sit well with Sky Q but I have just put that off as I don’t know anyone locally who has Sky Stream.

If the 3 mini boxes lose connection then maybe it's the link from the main Sky Q box that is problematic.

well I'm glad to hear its not just us then, we seem to have the same problem.

Yes, its definitely the link between the main box and the minis but you would have thought if they were ALL on ethernet, this wouldn't be a problem.

If they are all connected via ethernet, are they all connected to the router or a separate switch ?

All connected to the router by a switch...

I'm on BT Full Fibre 900. Their router connects to my TP-Link Omada switch and then everything runs off that. My 6 APs, various ethernet going to other rooms which most they plug into a smaller switch, say for example, in my living room where my tv, sky q main box, firestick and the kids Nintendo connect to. Same for the basement and my other 2 reception rooms.

I used Chat GPT to trouble shoot and I ended up letting it analyse all the data packets on the main switch (way over my IT ability) and it didn't seem to think there was a problem. I've turned off auto-standby on all the boxes, I've changed settings on the switch (as proposed by Chat GPT) but no joy and at the end of my tether.

If it was me, I'd just stomach it but as I've got my parents living with us now and it seems like they watch tv every minute of every day, I feel more compelled to get it fixed!

If you are not on sky broadband you have to turn off wifi completely on all boxes (both channels) and select 'wired connection to non sky outer' - but assume you have done that. Have you checked your router stats?

MuttleyCAFC · September 26

And if your internet goes down, no tv.

robinofottershaw · October 15

JohnBoyUK said:

Has anyone tried Sky Stream?

I've had Sky Q for years (1 main box, 3 minis) and I didn't have a problem with them at all at my old house. We had Cat 6 run everywhere and they worked fine and they'd maybe go down once a year on average, if that.

We moved a year ago, had ethernet run everywhere in the first couple of weeks before we even had Sky reinstalled and to begin with, everything was absolutely fine. However, last 9 months or so, the mini boxes completely lose connection with the main box maybe 2-3 times an evening and it is driving me absolutely nuts.

I've tried changing the main switch, I've tested all the cables yet Sky have been next to useless, because as soon as you say the boxes are on a wired network, they wash their hands of it (which I understand as every network is different and you can't really expect them to sort that out!)

I wonder if its time to totally drop Sky Q and replace it with Stream as presumably all the stream boxes work independently and connect directly to the internet?

Open to any words of wisdom

I posted a couple of weeks that I was experiencing similar problems with Sky Q and that a Sky engineer had suggested a few months ago that we might be better off switching to Sky Stream. Despite two engineer visits our Sky Q experience has got progressively worse in previous months. I don’t know if it was down to the Gigaclear (our internet provider) / Sky interface, the age of our Sky Q equipment or what. We were experiencing excessive buffering when we watched the TV in the room where the main box was located and virtually every time we tried to watch in another room the minibox had to be reconnected and would again disconnect when watching. Our broadband if FTP from Gigaclear and we get spends of over 400 Mbps in the study where the cable comes in and a minimum of 90 Mbps via ethernet elsewhere despite the house being constructed in stone with block and beam concrete between floors.

Anyway, I called Sky on Tuesday and said we would like to switch. Four Sky Stream Pucks were duly delivered yesterday. I connected 3 of them yesterday afternoon and everything is working really well. Am just waiting for the packaging to arrive from Sky in order to return the Sky Q boxes to them.

The broadband bandwidth requirement depends on whether you are watching tv in standard HD or Ultra HD/4K, or a combination. We are running one 4K TV (requires 25 Mbps) and 3 TVs in standard HD (needs an additional 5 Mbps x 3), so requires 40 Mbps in the unlikely event we had all four TVs running at the same time, with a recommended package speed of 60-80Mbps in case you have other devices running (phones, laptops, smart tech) also running). If you had four TVs running simultaneously in Ultra HD / 4K, you would need 100Mbps, with a recommended package speed of 150 Mbps.

I appreciate there are all kinds of differing scenarios individuals have with their tv/broadband setups, but at the moment it looks like Sky Stream is working for us. I also understand Sky are no longer providing Sky Q to new customers, so an IPTV solution is probably the way to go.

SE9toDA2 · October 15

If you are getting speeds in excess of 400mb in the study then you should be able to get similar speeds in the other rooms if you are using Ethernet.

Are your other rooms connected via cat cables using a switch ? Your switch might need updating as it sounds like it is only capable of speeds of 100mb if you are only getting speeds of 90mb.

JohnBoyUK · October 15

I really do need to get on the phone to Sky to get it sorted but its going to be like pulling teeth!

robinofottershaw · October 15

JohnBoyUK said:

I really do need to get on the phone to Sky to get it sorted but it’s going to be like pulling teeth!

I went through Customer Services (tel no: 0344 241 0333) and to my surprise I had it sorted in 20 minutes. The voice message tries to push you towards changing your contract via the My Sky app but I just asked to speak to someone and got through quite quickly.

FYI, you get one Sky Stream puck free and each additional puck costs a £39.95 one-off charge.

robinofottershaw · October 15

SE9toDA2 said:

If you are getting speeds in excess of 400mb in the study then you should be able to get similar speeds in the other rooms if you are using Ethernet.

Are your other rooms connected via cat cables using a switch ? Your switch might need updating as it sounds like it is only capable of speeds of 100mb if you are only getting speeds of 90mb.

Not all our ethernet sockets are close to where we have our TVs located, including in the lounge! So, initial options considered were to install new ethernet ports near the TVs/Sky boxes (a bit of an expense including some redecoration), have cables running around the room connecting from the existing ethernet socket to the Sky equipment (untidy).

The third option, which we have gone for is have Wireless Access Ports (WAPs) hard wired into a few of the existing ethernet sockets. Essentially they act as WiFi extenders just like the BT, Sky, Gigaclear disc or tower extenders. So, yes it reduces the WiFi speed down to ~90 Mbps in those rooms but this is much better than the 18 Mbps we used to get from BT via Fibre to The Cabinet, as Gigaclear are the only company providing Fibre to The Premises in our village.

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