Is you Sky Q being intermittent, buffering, dropping WiFi connection or being slow when connected via any 3rd party WiFi or UniFi WiFi?
The Sky Q and the Sky Q Mini boxes are terrible at WiFi overall. The whole Sky WiFi system in these boxes are weak and poorly designed. They typically only work well with other Sky equipment and you might assume this is done on purpose.
So if you have a very good WiFi installation like UniFi or similar and running into issues with your Sky box then here is the solution…
The main plan here is to disable the Sky Q internal WiFi and to use the Ethernet LAN port (yellow) on the back to connect a WiFi bridge.
You could also just hardwire cable the Sky LAN port directly into your router or network switch. Just remember to turn the Sky internal WiFi off.
Alternatively you can try a Powerline Adapter like the TP-Link TL-PA9020PKIT AV2000 to do the network bridge but when using power line adapters always remember they don’t always work well if the house wiring is too long/old or has interference from other devices. So if they don’t work well or are intermittent then go with a direct cable or WiFi solution.
Before you start make sure you remove any Sky boosters or any other rouge equipment on the network.
Step 1: Get an “Ethernet to WiFi” adapter – ideally use another UniFi Access Point and PoE adapter (802.3AF Injector) for this purpose to act as this gateway. If you have another device like a TV that you would also like to connect via this new wireless link then instead of getting the PoE adapter rather get a small PoE switch like the UniFi Switch Lite 8 port.
You will need to adopted it on the network via the switch first and make sure it has MESH enabled which is the default.
Then use a PoE adapter to power the UniFi AP when connecting it to the Sky box. So that the LAN side of the PoE adapter goes into the Sky box yellow port and the power port of the PoE goes into the AP. Careful not to plug the power output side into the Sky box!
Any of the UniFi AP units will do this job nicely.
If you have a different type of 3rd party WiFi solution you can try something like “BrosTrend 1200Mbps Ethernet-2-WiFi Universal WiFi Adapter” but you will first need to configure it with your current WiFi details via WPS button or manually via web interface. Test it to ensure its relaying via the ethernet and then plug into the Sky box.
Step 2: On the Sky box press Home, navigate down to Settings. Do not press on Settings – stay there and press 0 0 1 Select.
This will get you into the installer menu and open the Network selection option. Now turn OFF 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz WiFi – Confirm and Exit.
You can reboot the Sky box to confirm all is good.
Step 3: Repeat steps 1 and 2 on any other Sky Mini boxes you have linked to the main Sky Q box.
Note that it takes a few minutes for the access point links to boot up and to be ready to handle a connection. So wait a good 5 minutes and then check the Sky box has internet – if not reboot the Sky box only and recheck the Sky internal WiFi is off as per step 2. You can open any app to be sure. Also make sure you do the main Sky Q box first. Some Sky boxes will require you to go back into the normal user Settings/Network menu and choose hardwired connection. If you have any further issues then make sure the WiFi AP is showing up in the UniFi devices App and the AP is showing good SIGNAL quality [Best -30dBm to Worst -67dBm] higher than 67 is not good with HD streaming. Note that you will not see ‘clients’ aka the Sky box connected to this WiFi AP as it is via the cable. You will see the Sky box in the App clients list under some random MAC address.
Overall this will get your Sky Q working well, operating faster and avoid all the nightmares that come with Sky WiFi.
Image of Sky Installer Setup Menu 0 0 1 Select and Turn OFF 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz – Then Confirm.
