SKY Hub - ac Compliant alternatives

[PhilCollins]

I have a question about replacing the SKY BB Hub currently being shipped.

I am trying to rationalise my network at home, it has become a sprawl of gigabit switches, range extenders and t-link nano-routers.

My new XMBC/gaming box has ac wifi and widi on the board and will effectively replace my Blu-Ray, inbuilt TV streaming and Xboxes to become the central hub for all the screens in the house. The router will need a gigabit board it in as well; my aging Synology DS211J will be pumping out media files across the network.

Does anyone have any suggestions that they have experience with? It seems to be hit and miss still with this standard.

Cheers

I think there is enough information out there for me to extract the details I need from the SKY hub -I keep the SKY hub at hand if I need to contact them for technical support.

[walibe]

Hi, I am attempting to do exactly the same thing as to be honest the Sky Hub is crap. Its poor wireless signal and many lock ups (particularly with skys own wifi extenders) are a pain in the bum. Theres two ways to do this. One is use your existing Sky hub and disable the wifi and use it only to feed the internet connection to a decent wifi router. The other far more limited option is to get a all in one ADSL/VDSL (dependent on connection type) wifi router which are fewer in number for ac.

Basically for all in one models I've these and all are pretty new and unknown:

TP Link D7

ZyXEL VMG8924-B10A

D-Link DSL-3580L

There is a netgear one as well but its pretty poor.

Your best option may be to go stand alone wifi router plugged into the sky hub which I'd love to discuss if you decide to go that way.

[MrJim]

The problem is that the Sky Hub is 'hardwired' with your Sky password, & you need a router which is capable of doing the extra handshaking in order to get a connection. I tried a couple of routers (a D-Link & TP-Link) before I realised this - if you google it, there are several forum posts about how to use a third-party router. Is a really pain, because you have to use packet-sniffing software to extract your password from the Sky Hub, & then add it to a suitable router. If you have a router with WRT firmware installed & you're happy writing setup scripts it's possible to do it, but I found another varient of WRT for Asus routers (here) which allows you to just enter your Sky Mac address & password into a setup field, & it works fantastically.

The alternative it to plug another router into the Sky router & use the latter just for connection purposes as Walibe suggests, which in all honesty, is by far the easiest solution...but doesn't cut down the clutter

[walibe]

Its not hard to retrieve the password with Wireshark (I use it daily for work purposes but several novices have posted their success on-line) but separating out the wireless element from the ADSL just makes a lot of sense. You could move for example, upgrade your broadband etc etc.

I would try Jimbobgod1969s approach myself. The ASUS AC68U looks to be the best thing out there right now followed perhaps by the nighthawk and Linksys ea6900

[PhilCollins]

Thanks for the replies I've been looking over the options.

I'm going to see how good the WIDI option is on the new board. I bought a Netgear Push2TV box to test broadcasting to each screen.

If it can hold a decent signal it rids me of the hdmi, spdif and ethernet cabling and nano routers. The other side is the setup will be same price as the ASUS. From the reviews I've read I'm pretty sure I'll be back when it doesn't work