Sky Broadband and Mesh Network

Associate
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Recently moved house and discovered that unless your right above or on the same level as the router, we get very little Wi-Fi in other rooms. Part of the problem being the main box for the phone line is by the front door and the rooms we use as an office and ones with tv’s etc in are at the other end of the house.

Have been looking at getting a mesh network to hopefully solve this issue but have seen a fair few posts around the net with people having issues getting mesh systems to work correctly with the Sky router. Was thinking of going for the TP- Link Deco M5.

Anyone recommend a system or have any issues with setting up a mesh network on Sky?
 
Soldato
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Mesh works the same with Sky as it does with any other ISP, the issue is when people buy routers including mesh that don't support DHCP60/61 options on Sky, or they don't understand how Sky mini boxes work. There are essentially three types of mesh:

Cheap: This is basically crap, it'll share the same radio between clients and backhaul to other nodes.
Wired: Same as above, but has a RJ45 port to allow you to use wired backhaul, obviously anything wired is *much* more reliable, but you need to run a wire to each node.
Expensive: Often similar wired, but has dedicated wireless radio backhaul to communicate with the nodes and a separate dedicated radio for the clients. If you absolutely have to have wireless mesh and can't run a cable, this is what you want.

The cheap/effective solution is an AP (or router such as the AX3 which is wifi6 at a stupidly low price and ironically supports meshing, running in AP mode) on the end of a cable in a central location, run one cable, install one AP, marvel that something designed specifically to provide decent wifi coverage does exactly that and if you ever want to upgrade it, it's easy/cheap.
 
Soldato
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As long as the mesh system can run in AP mode you shouldn't have too much issues, as above trying to use it as a router requires it to support a few extra things for it to work with Sky.

If you can't run a cable across the house then the M5 is fine. I've recommended it to a few others and it's been working fine for them, although none of them use Sky and use an ISP with a bad router in the first place (been mostly EE/TalkTalk/Plusnet, etc). It also allows ethernet backhaul if you eventually do plan to wire up the house.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
2 Oct 2003
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Location
Sheffield
Mesh works the same with Sky as it does with any other ISP, the issue is when people buy routers including mesh that don't support DHCP60/61 options on Sky, or they don't understand how Sky mini boxes work. There are essentially three types of mesh:

Cheap: This is basically crap, it'll share the same radio between clients and backhaul to other nodes.
Wired: Same as above, but has a RJ45 port to allow you to use wired backhaul, obviously anything wired is *much* more reliable, but you need to run a wire to each node.
Expensive: Often similar wired, but has dedicated wireless radio backhaul to communicate with the nodes and a separate dedicated radio for the clients. If you absolutely have to have wireless mesh and can't run a cable, this is what you want.

The cheap/effective solution is an AP (or router such as the AX3 which is wifi6 at a stupidly low price and ironically supports meshing, running in AP mode) on the end of a cable in a central location, run one cable, install one AP, marvel that something designed specifically to provide decent wifi coverage does exactly that and if you ever want to upgrade it, it's easy/cheap.

Fortunately I don't have to worry about any Sky mini boxes as just have Sky Broadband and the usual laptops/tvs/consoles/phones etc connected to it. I had never thought about using another router as an AP and doing it that way, interesting.

Is the AX3 the Huawei AX3000 router? Take it any router that allows use as an AP would be suitable.
 
Soldato
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7,177
Fortunately I don't have to worry about any Sky mini boxes as just have Sky Broadband and the usual laptops/tvs/consoles/phones etc connected to it. I had never thought about using another router as an AP and doing it that way, interesting.

Is the AX3 the Huawei AX3000 router? Take it any router that allows use as an AP would be suitable.

As long as it will run in AP mode, yes. The Huawei kit is very, very keenly priced for what it is, if you want wifi6 on a budget, or cheap AP's that support mesh, it's basically a hidden gem in an otherwise expensive game.
 
Associate
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Sheffield
As long as it will run in AP mode, yes. The Huawei kit is very, very keenly priced for what it is, if you want wifi6 on a budget, or cheap AP's that support mesh, it's basically a hidden gem in an otherwise expensive game.

Cool, have a £50 amazon voucher needs using so seems like a free, easy way of possible solving my issue. Thanks for the help. :)
 
Soldato
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Sandwich, Kent
Deco M5 would work fine. It's a good balance between performance and cost.

Just plug your sky router into the primary deco unit and it'll all work from there. I'd suggest turning 5g off on your sky router so that it doesn't interfere with the Deco's backhaul channel.

If you can run an ethernet between the M5's then it'll work a lot better. Otherwise, make sure each deco has a good signal from another deco.

I've got 6 deco M5s, with an ethernet between the top and bottom floors. It all works fine, incredibly easy to setup and very reliable. I did try using a X20 as the main deco, but the features you get with it were actually worse than on the M5's, so I sent it back.
 
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