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The Sky Q boxes create a Sonos-style mesh network, meaning the speed of your broadband isn't so crucial – the wi-fi network itself determines how well the system streams content around your home. If you have Sky Broadband, each box also works as a wi-fi hotspot. In most cases, then, if you get connectivity problems on a Sky Q Mini box, it’s because of interference on the 5GHz network, although 2.4GHz interference can cause problems. Knowing that, the answer to the problem is to avoid interference. Here are the steps you can take. Change your router’s Wi-Fi channel As it stands, the only way to use wireless is to use the Sky Q wireless mesh as set up during installation. This has both a 2.4GHz and a 5GHz network. In most cases, the 2.4GHz network is used to provide a wireless hotspot if you have Sky broadband, but it can also be used for TV data sent to the Mini boxes. Actual streaming takes place over the 5GHz network, as this has the required bandwidth. After a long wait, HDR finally debuted on Sky Q in May 2020 and the amount of HDR content has grown fairly rapidly since: there are now hundreds of movies and plenty of TV shows provided by Sky in HDR, plus the huge HDR libraries of the aforementioned embedded streaming services. Live Premier League football and F1 are now available in HDR, and more and more sports are getting the high dynamic range treatment. Just note that not all Sky Q box models are compatible.
Volume seems to be well standardised across the channels, so you don’t have to keep reaching for the remote whenever you switch over.Sky has made a concerted effort to integrate various streaming services into the Sky platform, so you can now browse the likes Netflix and Disney+ content within the interface – so long as you have the dedicated subscriptions for each. On the downside, however, one of the biggest downsides is that you cannot record directly onto the Mini Box. However, you can use the box to record content on your main Sky Q box and stream or watch the content later on in the Mini Box. Without help it will never replace a proper stereo system or even a decent Bluetooth speaker, but you can just about get away with using it to play music from a phone over AirPlay or Bluetooth, and Sky now has native apps for Spotify and BBC Sounds. Verdict Tenet is one such 4K title and it looks sensational, with oodles of detail, crisp definition and enticing three-dimensionality. The HDR ensures there's plenty of pop and vibrancy, too. That being said the Sky+ would still work fine with one cable and the Sky box set to single feed mode, you just wouldn’t be able to record one programme and watch another. This isn’t the case with the Sky Q box as it needs two satellite cables connected to a wideband LNB. This is because the two signals are not identical like with Sky+ and Freesat+. With Sky Q one cable provides the vertical polarised signals and the other provides the horizontal signals, with one cable you will only get half of the services. But like I already said it is possible to Sky Q on one cable with no loss of services using dSCR technology.
Once all the cables are securely connected, put your viewing card into the slot on the right-hand side of your box, chip first with the chip facing up. Instead, type 001, then press Select. This brings up the hidden engineer’s system menu. Go to Network, and then you can change the 5GHz Wi-Fi channel width, selecting from: 80MHz / ch36 (default); 40MHz / ch. 36; and 40Mhz / ch.44. It’s worth trying all three to see if it makes a difference. Each popular Sky TV show now has a ‘show centre’, too. This is a hub from which users can access all seasons, episodes, broadcast schedules and on-demand links, and these show centres even exist for certain Disney+ shows such as The Walking Dead and Loki. As you can see, the latter two options use 40MHz channel width, which is effectively half the bandwidth of the 80MHz default. This reduces the chance of interference, though, so it might work for you. Get a Sky Q BoosterThe quality of the sound you’ll get from Sky Q depends largely on what you plug it into, but it supports Dolby Digital and Dolby Atmos, and can output to a 5.1 surround sound system or soundbar over HDMI or optical cable. The Review states that " the wi-fi network itself determines how well the system streams content around your home " and my experience, along with many others, is that the reception by the mini-box is particularly sensitive to interference, resulting in pixilation, or complete drop-out of the stream, including the sound. This interference (source unknown) became so bad we would loose the Sky stream every day for several minutes at a time throughout the day, but at random times. Sky's solution was to hardwire the system, which defeats the idea behind Sky Q, but my own solution was to swap the location of the main box and the mini-box, in relation to the router, and this has helped. However, be wary as the Sky Engineer wouldn't reinstall the terrestrial TV connections they had undone and we had to pay an external engineer to do this (Sky have recently settled a complaint about this by paying the engineer's cost). You could get them to leave your existing cables as is and just route the new power and HDMI cables outside of the TV stand during the install so that they can sign off that everything is fitted as per their requirements and in a working state.
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