Hi all,
I’ve gone into much detail to describe my
problem! ...
A few months ago I switched from my Sky WiFi to the top Virgin fibre optic package, purely because Sky broadband was so slow. While on Sky broadband, my Sky Q network (1 silver box + two minis) performed outstandingly as all boxes acted as WiFi hotspots and there was only one seemless WiFi network running through my house.
However, after switching to Virgin I found that one little Hub 3 could not wirelessly provide the high speeds that came in from the Fibre Optic cable! As well as it not being able to reach many rooms in my house as we have 4 floors.
So, I purchased the RBK50 Netgear Orbi Tri-band Wifi system. I set my Virgin Hub 3 into modem mode and set the Orbi router as my main router (so the Virgin box did not output any WiFi signal).
After spending hours setting this network up, the Orbi performed incredibly and combined with an Orbi satellite my entire house was covered in high speed 5GHz WiFi. The satallite (WiFi extender , part of the expandable WiFi mesh) , communicates back to the main Orbi router via a dedicated backchannel which is 5GHz ch108 (channel 98-114 is taken up by this).
Furthermore I then continued to connect my Sky Q to this network. At first the system operated okay and then now and again the internet status on the settings page of the Sky Q would go from a tick to a cross over and over again and I would have to network reset the Q to fix this. After connecting the Sky Q’s together my general WiFi speed from the Orbi dropped.
I went to the Sky/Netgear community for help and this is when I learnt about the Sky WiFi Mesh clashing with my Orbi WiFi mesh.
Basically, the 5GHz channel on my Orbi cannot be changed past channel 50 or below channel 34 (and it is obviously 80MHz) and in turn the Sky Q mesh either operates on 80MHz between Channel 34-50 or 40MHz between channel 34-42 or 40MHz between channel 42-50.
So in simple terms the Sky Q communicates with the Sky minis within the same WiFi channels as my home WiFi (the orbi). Because of this I have two WiFi networks in my house which are constantly clashing with eachother and consequently slowing eachother down drastically.
To tackle this, I have done what a Netgear moderator suggested , in his words:
“Force the Sky Q system to use a narrow 40GHZ band using the 'engineers menu' options on your main Sky box. To get to this scroll to the "Settings" menu and before selecting it type in 001 on the remote and then hit the select button. You should see a message pop up at the top of the screen warning you are in the advanced menu. Goto "Network" and you should see an option "5GHZ wifi channel width'. You now have two options, and will need to experiment to work out which one is best for you as it will depend on other wifi networks in your area (if you have a wifi scanner like WiFI explorer of inSSIDer that should make things easier to work out which is best combition for you):
(a) Set the Sky Q to 40 MHZ/Ch.36 and set your Orbi to channel 48
OR
(b) Set the Sky Q to 40 MHZ/Ch 44 and set your Orbi to channel 36”
Pretty much what he is saying is to half the width of the Sky Q channels so they communicate on less 5GHz bandwidth, but by doing this there is less of a clash between WiFi networks , however they still do majorly crash as I found out...
I thought this solution had fixed the problem, however a couple days after doing this the download speeds on my Sky Q’s slowed right down and my Sky Q Silver+2 minis are unable to load Catch Up TV (only shows currently downloaded shows), they also do not show On Demand (shows the message 'Sorry, there are currently no programmes of this type available') , it shows no new movies for Sky Cinema (only movies that I currently have downloaded) - kids also does this, Sky Store also does not load (shows the same message as On Demand) as well as Sports, Music and Apps.
In turn I have done full internet resets, I have also reset settings via the engineers menu on all 3 Sky Q's as well as switching back to 80MHz but the problem still persisted and nothing would load. I contacted sky and without even suggesting a solution they instantly said they would send an engineer out in a couple weeks, which is now booked. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like this engineer will be able to do much!
Now, being a couple days after I switched the Q’s to 40MHz the problem still arises and I’m clueless! Now and again some options will become available like Sky cinema and Sky catch up, however this is only for a couple minutes and then it becomes un-available again.
Tonight, the Sky minis completely stopped working and so I reset the internet system and Sky system but this didn’t work. Both my sky minis are now unable to connect to the Sky Q Silver box.
I know the best option would be to hard wire (via Ethernet) all the Sky devices to the internet and completely disable their 2.4 and 5GHz WiFi (which would completely clear the channels for my home internet with Virgin via the Orbi), but this would be expensive as one of my minis would when to have a Ethernet cable coming up a wall and under a floor to the router. I also do not know if Ethernet works very well?
Also, if I do manage to switch everything to Ethernet, can I connect 1 of my minis to a 5 port switch which is directly connected to my Router Orbi?
Also, would Ethernet still work if my Sky Silver Box was connected via Ethernet to the Orbi Satellite? As the satellite would then send the sky q data back wirelessly to the router?
So I am open to absolutely any advice/solutions anyone can give?
Please ask any more questions as I urgently need your help!!!!!
Aaron 🙂
