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Sky Q boasts all of the popular features that consumers demand, like integrated catch-up, on-demand, Netflix and Prime, but can the hardware itself be made less prone to crashing?
Here's a few ways we've discovered over the years to help you get good reliability from your setup and make the most from your Sky Q system
If you can! run the Sky Q box or boxes on wired ethernet cable rather than the default wireless method, this improves network speed, frees up your airwaves, eliminates possible wifi interference and strengthens the communication between additional boxes. Once you have fed your main SkyQ box with a wired network connection you need to go into the menu of the connected box, highlight 'settings' (do not select it) and press '001 select' on the remote control, (you are now in the 'installer menu) simply set the 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless both to 'Off' and then confirm and 'backup' to exit. If you have a second or third box simply repeat for every box. Note! you must connect every box on your network with a cable for this to improve the stability significantly - if you cannot connect every SkyQ box with an ethernet cable we would not recommend that you attempt this.
2. How many SkyQ boxes should I have? TekBlog recommends the maximum number of Sky Q boxes to be the magic number of three, which includes the main UHD box. Why? because even though you can get sky Q working reliably with more than 3 boxes, you cannot watch different content on more than 3 boxes simultaneously! - yes that is correct. So for example; what happens is that you will be notified that you need to go downstairs and turn off the kitchen tv's sky box that you just left on knowing that it will go into standby by itself but not aware that the lounge and guest room box were already in use. So in short, keep the total amount of mini boxes and main boxes to 'three' and that scenario can never arise meaning you can watch any of the boxes that you have at anytime unrestricted.
3. Do I need both cables from the dish connected? Tekblog have found that for unknown reasons the UHD box (main box) seems to be more reliable when connected with a single cable to the left hand port, this is known as SCR mode and your box should automatically detect if you have altered this.
4. Which standby mode should I select? it depends on your level of understanding! For the best reliability we have found that turning the Standby mode to 'None' can help with the stability of the system. BUT! we don't recommend that you set this unless you are a competent user and understand how to differentiate between turning off the Sky box and turning off the TV. If you do understand this then we recommend that you set this to 'None' and ensure that you turn off the box manually with the remote after every use which will actually be more eco-friendly because there will never be dormant on-time. To ensure you have turned the box 'off' we recommend that you turn off the sky box first (witness the picture go off) and then turn 'off' the TV (long press the power button 2/3 seconds). To find the Standby mode settings press Home/Settings/Setup/Preferences
5. Should I alter the IP / Network settings in my Sky Q boxes? You should only alter the IP or Network settings in your SkyQ box if you have a basic understanding of how network device settings work. If you are the latter, there are some benefits in certain circumstances from changing the IP settings. By default the sky box will be set to what is known as DHCP (it means the router will give the sky box any IP address it likes). changing the address to 'static' has benefits with more sophisticated setups - particularly where a third party control system is in use (if you do this you must ensure that no other device has the address you are assigning and you then reserve the address inside the router).
The Gateway address must always remain to be the IP address of the actual internet router (very often for domestic systems this will be 192.168.1.1), but you can change the DNS address which by default is the same as the gateway/router but can sometimes improve the redirects speed and performance if you choose another DNS such as 8.8.8.8 which belongs to Google. To alter these settings: Home/Settings/Setup/Network/Advanced/Set Manually.