[Trev]

I’m getting fed up with weak/medium wifi signal in the bedroom and garden. I have a Sky Q hub which when looking at online reviews it seems is to do with the router being poor than anything else.

Thus i have come up with 2 options –

1. Pay £100+ for a mesh network and stay with Sky
2. Go with another provider in the hope their router provides a better wifi range, and if not revert to option 1.

Seeing as i’m out of contract with Sky and i could save some money by taking a new customer deal elsewhere, option 2 is what i am looking at.

Providers with a well reviewed router for wifi range seems to be BT or TalkTalk – Do any of you guys have these as your broadband provider, and if so would you mind giving me a little feedback in to how you rate them?

I’m not in a Virgin Media enabled area, I am however in a Gigaclear enabled area which provides much faster speeds, but at a cost, and i’m unable to find sufficient reviews on the wifi range of their router.

Cheers

Topic

[joss]

Trev don’t waste your money for mesh network. Simply buy a cheap TP-Link router and use it as a wifi extender.

I am with BT Trev while not the cheapest I am more than happy with the router they provide. In fact I have 2 spare brand new BT 7 routers. Wifi signal is excellent in our house 1905 build solid brick and wifi reaches everywhere.

Joss
Current car: Peugeot 308 GT Premium 1.2 Pure tech Petrol.
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[Trev]

Cheers Joss,

I live in a small 2 bed, mid-terrace house with paper thin walls – yet even in the lounge, in direct sight of the sky router, not 10 meters away, and i’m only getting a medium signal strength – it really is dire.

Your opinion on the BT router is similar to what i’ve read online, so it’s good to get the confirmation – thank you. I’m pretty sure it will be more than enough for my needs.

I’ve seen some terrific deals for BT in the past, involving straight-up discounts, but then with added gift card incentives, plus then you can get even more by going through a cash back site like Quidco.

I may even consider changing my whole package if the incentives are there, bringing over tv and mobile services too.

But i’m no hurry to change anything, I still get 40-45mbps on the wifi, but router says 70mbps is coming is, so think with a strong wifi signal i could be looking at 55-60mbps.

Saying that, I see BT only offer packages to 50mbps for me, yet all the rest offer up to 70mbps and that’s what i’m getting to the router now… i may query that with BT on the ol’ live chat.

[joss]

To Be honest Trev, there are so many things that can effect your wifi. I used to be a sky BB customer but dumped them years ago for BT Fibre.  But before I left sky I dumped their router and bought my own Netgear router. Wow what a difference that made. With the sky router you could not gain access to the settings. where as with a third party router you could access the settings. So you could see the information and out put from the router regarding signal and noise margins. It gets complicated so I wont go there for now.

If you are tech minded you might find these sites useful.

Kitz broadband information, a great site 

ThinkBroadBand. An other great web site

Joss
Current car: Peugeot 308 GT Premium 1.2 Pure tech Petrol.
Coming soon...BMW X2 sDrive 20i M Sport 5dr Step Auto In November 2025

[Trev]

Cheers Joss,

I’m not that technically minded, but always keen to learn so will look at those links tomorrow when i’m more awake, thank you.

I’ve had a right ol’ ding-dong with BT that has left them somewhat red-faced, resulting in them ‘getting back to me’.

To order BT i have to input my phone number and address and from that they identify what my line can carry and offer me the appropriate packages to suit my line. But although my line can carry 70mbps and currently does, they identify i can only carry 50mbps. So instead of being able to order Superfast Fibre 2, they are saying i can only order up to Superfast Fibre 1.

They were very insistent on phone and live chat my line is incapable of speed over 50mbps, but then i went on the community forum, someone showed me a link to post my current stats – posted it, which has proved they are incorrect.

So now i have to wait for them to get back to me, to explain why they are not offering me a package with speeds my line can easily handle.

Though now i’m questioning myself why am i trying so damn hard to place an order with BT, shouldn’t it be the other way around, and for them to be trying to get my custom? lol

[joss]

Morning Trev. There are just so many factors that come into play here. Those stats are very good. However they are at Max. You then need to factor in how far away from the telephone exchange you are. Then How far away from the nearest street cabinate you are. Then comes the age and quality of the copper wire from the cab to your home.

All of these need to taken into account.  BT use automatic profiling. Both at the exchange and street cab.

So BT want you to have a connection that is solid and sustainable at a certain board rate or speed. So technically your line could support 70 mbps downstream the reality is the it would not be sustainable.

So you would end up with your router dropping out and reconnecting but because of the BT system it would lower  your profile automatically until your connection is stable and sustainable.

So BT saying your profile would be 50 mbps is taking into account all of the above. to provide a stable connection.

Joss
Current car: Peugeot 308 GT Premium 1.2 Pure tech Petrol.
Coming soon...BMW X2 sDrive 20i M Sport 5dr Step Auto In November 2025

[Trev]

Cheers Joss,

The thing is i am currently getting the 70mbps and it is stable, never had a drop-out. Other providers offer this speed, just not BT. I can also get the 300mbps gigaclear service, though that i believe involves extending the fibre from the cabinet to premises…. still not wrote that one off, but at £45 a month it’s very steep.

Here’s my router stats I’ve just taken –

[joss]

Wow!  Noise margin are super low. which is very good Trev. Usually, a target of 5.0 is what we aim for. This indicates that you have a very good line indeed. Sod BT and go with gigaclear.

here are my line stats

DSL uptime: 1 Days, 15 Hours 7 Minutes 54 Seconds
Data rate: 20.00 Mbps / 64.29 Mbps
Maximum data rate: 27494 / 65145
Noise margin: 9.8 dB / 6.1 dB
Line attenuation: 13.9 dB

My noise margin could and should be lower but BT wont lower it.

Joss
Current car: Peugeot 308 GT Premium 1.2 Pure tech Petrol.
Coming soon...BMW X2 sDrive 20i M Sport 5dr Step Auto In November 2025

[Trev]

Joss, your speeds are really good too!

I walked from the cabinet to my home this afternoon, part of a longer walk, and measured the distance as 370 meters so pleased with the router stats even more now.

Gigaclear want £45 a month for the 300mbps package, now way would i consider the 900mbps package for £75 a month! But i wonder if i would see a massive difference between 70 and 300, and if it’s worth the extra cost.

BT are out the equation, they are insisting they won’t provide me with a speed greater than 55mbps.

[Anonymous]

Hi @Trev i would get a second hand apple router the tall square one plug that into your Sky router and set all your devices to just use the Apple router, i did this 6 months ago and have no issues since, i’m Virgin media cable at 380mb and can get the full speed on all AC wifi devices.

[Trev]

Cheers Dale,

I’m reading up on it now – the Sky Q Router isn’t the best for connection to other 3rd party equipment, but i’m lead to believe they are releasing a new router as soon as next month. That being the case it maybe easier for me to renegotiate my contract and have the new router. Anyhow it’s something i’m going to have to revisit after my hols – desperate last minute savings required, don’t want to miss out on my paella and sangria.

Thanks again

[Anonymous]

All i have done is plugged it in to one of the network ports and the Apple device knew what to do. I find that the standard device they supply you find that in your area you might have 10 houses that have the same device and as such can be fighting against each other on the same wifi channel.

[Trev]

There’s only 4 houses, including mine, that is wifi range and i’m the only Sky customer. But you are correct as i used an app wifi analyzer to see what channels they were using and although my router apparently selects the best, it seemed congested on 6, so changed it to channel 1 and got marginal improvements. But that was only on the 2.4ghz channel, the 5ghz channel which i think the router uses more there was no congestion at all.

[Trev]

Update: I seem to have sorted my wifi speed issues out with minimal costs.

I didn’t realise the Sky Q box acts as a hot spot and it seems devices were connecting to this rather than the Q hub. Although the box is closer, the speeds are poor. So i turned off the wifi of the box through the engineers menu, rebooted devices and they connected straight to the hub. Instead of the 20mbps upstairs, and 30mbps in the lounge, i now get 50mbps+ all round the house.

Only thing i had to do is connect the Sky Q box by ethernet to the hub so i can access all features – this was pretty easy as was a straight 10m line, all hidden, otherwise i could have used power adapters.

So yeah pretty pleased with the result.

[Anonymous]

That’s great news Trev handy one to remember for the future.

 

Dale.

[joss]

Persistence pays Trev. Well done.

Joss
Current car: Peugeot 308 GT Premium 1.2 Pure tech Petrol.
Coming soon...BMW X2 sDrive 20i M Sport 5dr Step Auto In November 2025

[Author]

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