Help fix my WiFi

[Lukas239]

Morning all, couldn't find a similar and recent thread on this.

Current Sky customer with the provided Sky WiFi hub (ER110 i believe). It regularly kicks devices off the WiFi and drops out. I'm having to reconnect phones and the Q box at least twice a day.

Have done some troubleshooting and it's not the broadband service or individual devices. Also had no luck contacting sky.

I want to replace the WiFi router for ones that's reliable and whilst I'm at it, give me more range. I've erected a shed at the bottom of the garden (~35m from modem) which I would like internet connection in but cannot be wired. Can anyone recommend a simple set of requirements or recommendations for this?

I know nothing about DNS and NAT and all that rubbish, plug & play would be lovely if it exists.

[dundarach]

It can be a pain and you really need someone local to help if you're not confident.

What you need are some range extenders, however when you set them up, you need to make sure they don't give out their own IP addresses, as that'll mess up internal networking somewhat (printing and file sharing etc.)

I've never used a sky router, however I would expect you can replace it with a better one.

Do you have your connection details from SKY, or are they all setup automatically?

I live in Hull so we pretty much only have KCom, however this does then generally mean we're all using our own routers

[xeny]

Lukas239 said:

Morning all, couldn't find a similar and recent thread on this.

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=95&t=1784687&i=820

[Captain_Morgan]

I looked at this for someone recently and If you want to replace the router on Sky you'll need one which supports DHCP authentication option 61

Have a google there are a bunch of videos on it I recall that both tp-link and draytek make suitable modem/router/access points

I know that tp-link also has a line that supports mesh called onemesh so in a ideal world you’d get a modem/router/access point from that range so you can add mesh nodes to expand your coverage as needed

I have a vague recollection that draytek have a similar option but can’t recall the details of that

[camel_landy]

xeny said:

Lukas239 said:

Morning all, couldn't find a similar and recent thread on this.

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&f=95&t=1784687&i=820

As we have soooo many 'fix my Wifi' type threads, I have previously suggested we need a 'sticky'.

M

[eein]

I've been setting up Mesh Wifi in my and various relatives homes recently. I've gone for the Asus system as it is both simple yet has advanced stuff if you want. It also happily lets you mix old and new and different models of Asus mesh units, so my 6 year old Asus routed gather dust in a cupboard is now revived as a mesh node.

It's not the cheapest stuff, in my house I've got 2 x XT8 units and 3 x XD4 mini units, all connected via a switch so it's wired backhaul. I'm planning to put one of the mini XD4 units in the shed (I also have an erection at the bottom of the garden) and I will not have a cable to connect it, so I'll just make sure one of the house units is near the back of the house so it can piggy back to the shed unit wirelessly.

At my parents I've just got a 3 x XD4 setup connected directly to their Virgin Media router set to passthrough mode.

In my wee sister's I've got a XT8 main unit and then my old RT-AC68U unit as a node, again connected directly to her Virgin Media router set to passthrough mode.

The 3 x XD4 units are currently £217.99 on black Friday deals and are WiFi 6. The old RT-AC68U unit is WiFi 5 and you can pick them up on ebay for around £50.

The Asus system seemed extremely easy to setup on all three different setups I've done.

The only thing it setting your Sky unit appropriately. Some telco routers you can log on to and find a option to set them in 'passthrough' mode, which is the ideal - you then just connect an ethernet cable from that to your main mesh wifi node. Some dont have this (eg my TalkTalk router) so you would log on to it and just disable wifi and then connect the same - this setup can cause problems if you are doing fixed IPs and remote connecting from the outside back to stuff in your house... it is possible, but you need to know a little about networking, but it sounds like you're not doing that.

[Paul Drawmer]

Is channel contention still a thing with modern wifi units?

[numtumfutunch]

Lots of good advice here which I'll repeat in a simplified manner

I have a TP link Deco M5 mesh system and its brilliant
Im using 3 stations and the whole house is sorted with no delays or drop outs moving between areas

Its really easy to set up - basically plug one into your modem/box with a cable, install the Deco app on your phone and then youre good to go in a few minutes

Cheers

EDIT: I put one in the kitchen window and now have decent garden wifi too

[xeny]

Paul Drawmer said:

Is channel contention still a thing with modern wifi units?

There's a Scotty quote which answers that question.

It's an issue at 2.4GHz. It's an issue at 5 unless you can use DFS channels. How much 6E kit have you got?

[Paul Drawmer]

xeny said:

There's a Scotty quote which answers that question.

It's an issue at 2.4GHz. It's an issue at 5 unless you can use DFS channels. How much 6E kit have you got?

Your answer is over my head,
I do not have any wifi issues, but I wondered if the OP's problem might be that he is fighting for the same channels as a nearby system.

[xeny]

Paul Drawmer said:

Your answer is over my head,
I do not have any wifi issues, but I wondered if the OP's problem might be that he is fighting for the same channels as a nearby system.

Apologies.

Unless absolutely all your kit is very modern (and things like Firesticks don't make the cut) there is a very limited number of non interfering channels such that the odds of not having some contention are essentially nil unless you have no neighbours. In a way more modern kit has made the problem worse as it supports wider channels to get better performance, hence each access point uses more channels in one go. (this is normally where you see mention of 40 or 80 MHz wide channels as opposed to the old 20MHz).

That's the nature of the available radio frequency range.

[camel_landy]

Paul Drawmer said:

xeny said:

There's a Scotty quote which answers that question.

Your answer is over my head,

M

[Lukas239]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Some really useful stuff here thank you all.

With the above, do I need to keep the sky hub as the main router and bridge to these? Or does this replace the router all together?

[xeny]

Lukas239 said:

With the above, do I need to keep the sky hub as the main router and bridge to these? Or does this replace the router all together?

You keep the sky hub - these won't talk directly to the outside world. You can either run these in bridge mode (turns out bridge is a specific technical term) and route on the sky hub, or if the sky hub supports it, run the sky hub purely as a modem and route on these.

Best practice would be to turn the wifi off on the sky hub, and you route on one or the other, not both.

[Lukas239]

xeny said:

You keep the sky hub - these won't talk directly to the outside world. You can either run these in bridge mode (turns out bridge is a specific technical term) and route on the sky hub, or if the sky hub supports it, run the sky hub purely as a modem and route on these.

Best practice would be to turn the wifi off on the sky hub, and you route on one or the other, not both.

Excellent thank you.

After extensive research i'm down to a few options;
1. Replace the router altogether with a TP-link. 2 options in price bracket are the AC1200 and AC2100. Research suggests this should be a relatively direct replacement just need to log in and change a few settings. Not sure if this will impact SKY Q at all. Neither is WIFI 6 to my knowledge.

2. Go for the Mesh system as detailed above (S4 set seems the best for money) and disable WIFI on the hub (easy to do). Not sure if this will create any issues with duplicate networks?

Thoughts.

[eein]

camel_landy said:

Paul Drawmer said:

xeny said:

There's a Scotty quote which answers that question.

Your answer is over my head,

M

You can however increase your understanding of the physics of the universe, and you can engineer solutions that push the limits... as we saw in the transition from impulse to warp.

In the WiFi case above, the channel thing on 'old' 2.4GHz WiFi is still a thing, but less impacting as many devices use other frequencies. And the issues at 2.4GHz were not due to the laws of physics, it was due to the standards definitions which made auto-channel-selection in routers very conservative in when they choose to use a different channel. This is sensible in highly congested environments such as a densely packed apartment building with lots of different WiFi routers within reach of each other as it forces efficient and maximum use of all the channels available. However it is unnecessarily conservative for less dense places like average size and spaces houses where you might only 'see' 2 or 3 other households WiFi at a signal level that matters. In this latter situation there can sometimes be some minor benefit in manually setting channel... so long as your neighbors don't all do the same and choose the same channel number.