Starlink and Sky Q

[this blog is a work in progress]

Our Observations

Sky's WiFi does not appear to want to "play nicely" with other WiFi and this often brings it into direct conflict if you have an ISP which is not Sky supplying their own router box (as Starlink does), or if you want to add a "proper" WiFi solution to your property (like Deco as many people owning Starlink wish to). 

We would surmise that Sky's original Sky Q and WiFi premise was predicated on them being the ISP and them providing WiFi throughout a property through the use of miniboxes, whilst at the same time "dumbing down" the ability to propery control and configure that WiFi or connect the Sky infrastructure to a "proper" WiFi solution should it exist. To be honest, based on their observed performance we are actually sceptical that a Sky Q main box with miniboxes is even a proper intelligent mesh and believe it behaves more like a group of dumb extenders.

The other thing observable about Sky's default use of WiFi is it stomps all over the standard low 5GHz channels with a 80Mhz wide channel from channel 36, and that its use of the 2.4GHz band is not configurable in the way it would be on a normal WiFi router. Another issue is that it is not possible to do anything to diagnose intermittent communication issues in the relationship between the main box and miniboxes.

At some points in trying to solve issues we had our entire network grind to a stop and identified that the main box was generating a network storm necessitating us configuring storm control on the port it was connected to. 

Anecdotal Issues

The issues widely reported in getting Sky Q to work properly with Starlink we think are not actually unique to Starlink.  In fact  If you look at issues relating back to Sky Q, you will find problems reported not just in relation to Starlink but also most mobile networks including Three and EE, which we ourselves have had direct experience of.

If you go back to the earlier days of Sky Q there did indeed seem to be unexplained issues with mobile networks that were almost definitely to do with the internet connection; In late 2022 we noticed a lot of these issues seem to have been cured (and it appeared the user flows in Sky Q relating to WiFi configuration had been tweaked); however in some scenarios it seems that some symptoms still exist:

Common symptoms reported seem to be around problems with programmes not recording or downloading reliably, thumbnail images disappearing or not appearing, mini-boxes losing connectivity or even the whole Sky Q system seeming to stop working. Sometimes accompanying these symptoms and investigation of the settings will not just show that the internet connection has an X by it, but it is alternating every couple of seconds between being OK and disconnected.

Unlike our advice in our other blogs that is based on knowledge, skill and experience, many of the issus with Sky remains an enigma, so with the exception of Advice 1 and Advice 2, the other ideas below are based on what might help some people some of the time based on what we have seen in various forums.

Advice 1 - Disable the Sky Q WiFi

In short you simply don't want unruly WiFi interering with your "proper" WiFi which leads to the inevitable default advice with Sky Q issues which is "Turn the Sky WiFi off and wire the main box and  miniboxes".  To do the turning the WiFi off bit highlight "Settings" in the main Sky Q Side Menu and press 001 Select on the remote control and turn the WiFi off in both bands - of course you will need a wired connection to all the boxes...

Advice 2 - Spoof the Sky boxes so they think they have a Wired Connection 

Physically wiring  the Sky main box and all the Sky miniboxes may be inconvenient for a lot of people but if you are putting in a mesh system the boxes can be fooled as long as your mesh system has nodes with one or more physical ports as well as WiFi and will "bridge" the network connection so the physical port is also part of the local area network.  If your mesh node is sited near a Sky box you can connect it via an Ethernet cable and disable the Sky WiFi.  The Sky boxes will think they have a wired conenction as they don't know about there being a WiFi mesh completing their path to the gateway.

Advice 3 - Switch off ECO mode on Sky boxes

We have no evidence other than anecdotal for this one, but some report that the issues start when a minibox disconnects and doesn't reconnect properly.  We assume this works as it avoids a daily overnight disconnection and reduces the symptom rather than addressing the underlying cause which we suspect is a wireless/WiFi issue, since this doesn't seem to be needed if boxes are wired - we suspect it may be that the main box relays the DHCP setup when a minibox is not hard wired resulting in a minibox without proper network credentials or information.

Advice 4 - give Sky boxes fixed IP addresses

There is anecdotal evidence in common with Advice 3 above that the issue may be failure to get DHCP information after a reconnection.

To do this visit Settings>Setup>Network>Advanced Settings>Set Manually.  You will need to make sure any manual IP address provided is in the same subnet as your network and not within the range of the addresses allocated by your gateway.  You may want to look at our Gateway blog for more information on DHCP.

Advice 5 - A Reboot may not be enough - try a Network Reset

When we were at the peak of investigating issues with Sky Q and (predating Starlink), with Three 4G, we saw the Main box often would not get proper network credientials even if rebooted (again we suspect a DHCP issue/bug in the timing of getting DHCP).  To rectify we actually had to reset the network fully by doing a complete new network setup (Settings>Status>Network Connection>Network Setup>Reset),  Of course this also re-enables the WiFi, which you have to turn off again if you have wired boxes!

Advice 6 - Put Sky Q on it's own VLAN

This one is more for the experts than the home user (and you need professional level network switches to implement it): 

In desperation at one point we put all our sky boxes on a VLAN - this was mainly so we could easily point it at different ISPs at the point we had three as we were also suspecting that the issues were down to aggregated ISPs and length of sticky sessions and we could also confine usage to any single ISP we chose - historically we used this to prove that there were indeed strange WAN issues on EE and Three at different times that were outside of our control.  We were not able to reproduced these in late 2022.  We are reasonably confident there are no WAN issues affecting Sky Q now and we use it with no issues on Starlink (though it is still on its own VLAN as we never took it off and all the boxes are wired).