I cannot get Sky+ on demand/cinema/catch up to commence a download.

2862LAC with dual WAN: ADSL Line (approx 17mb/s down, 1 mb/s up) with LTE/4G unlimited SIM (speed varies wildly from approx. 11-80 down, 1-30 up depending on peak times etc). Auto Weight, Session-Based Load Balancing set.

Sky+ 2TB DVR (Note: not Sky Q others have asked about although the principle may be the same?) ethernet cat 6 connected to unmanaged switch to LAN port of router.
IP address of Sky Box Fixed/Reserved/Bound (whatever the appropriate expression is) i.e. constant.

Sky box ALWAYS HAS NETWORK connectivity – I can see the IP address in network settings on the box AND can browse the on demand/cinema/catch up etc (which I know in past when there has been a network failure I would not be able to do if connection dropped).

By setting up a Routing Policy to divert to ADSL – and altering nothing else – it ALWAYS works fine, however when I remove the IP from this policy i.e. going through default balancing both WANS it allows me to select for download (a random film etc), the red LED for recording is lit on the DVR and the planner shows “downloading” …….but download never starts AND/OR after a while simply says “failed”.

I thought it may be a firewall policy blocking the traffic and therefore tried “whitelisting” Sky IP and when that didn’t help I temporarily disabled ALL firewall policies….then I read somewhere that Sky needs to effectively ping the network and that it might be something to do with IGMP……

And here I confess I am an ex-programmer and fairly IT literate but networking has never been my forte! Help! Anyone have a similar set up or any ideas? I wondered whether turning on syslog might reveal anything: that will be my next course of action unless anyone can point me in the right direction.

therave wrote:
By setting up a Routing Policy to divert to ADSL – and altering nothing else – it ALWAYS works fine, however when I remove the IP from this policy i.e. going through default balancing both WANS it allows me to select for download (a random film etc), the red LED for recording is lit on the DVR and the planner shows “downloading” …….but download never starts AND/OR after a while simply says “failed”.

Does the converse apply - i.e. if set to always use LTE/4G does it work :?:

Assuming the answer is "yes", my guess would be, that when both are enabled, that the SKY server sees different parts of the request for a download, coming from different IP addresses at your end. That could be the case is the 2862 was using 'Session-Based', rather than 'IP-Based' Load Balancing.

I don't know how to configure it to use one rather than the other, but there is description of the two modes here: https://www.draytek.co.uk/information/solutions/load-balancing

Funny how great minds think alike and all that :lol: I was giving this some more thought and will try moving Sky to only LTE and post back result.

I admit to being "out of my depth" here....but whilst I have found nothing specific to my setup...most posts relating to youview/talktalk/BT/IPTV etc problems seem to infer an issue with IGMP/Multi-cast. This being the case I started to look at IGMP settings in the hope that I could turn on/off/ and experiment. What immediately struck me was that the IGMP Settings only seemed to apply to WAN1 (the ADSL in my case) but there seems no means from the drop-down etc of applying to the LTE? Or due to the balancing is this not necessary?

My present thinking therefore is that the IGMP might require "managing" in a different fashion; the only manner I could think of to do that (except buying a managed switch!!!) is to move the ethernet cable from the switch to a spare port on the router, create a VLAN, then select "PVC/VLAN" option in IGMP. Anyone have any thoughts?

I also wondered (I'm doing far to much "wondering"!!!) if this article from Draytek has any relevance to my situation?

https://www.draytek.com/support/knowledge-base/4908

Further comments very welcome.

"Does the converse apply - i.e. if set to always use LTE/4G does it work?"

No it doesn't. Same result as original post i.e. have a network, I can browse, select a download and then it fails to start. It must have something to do with the multi-cast setting, or the fact, as I stated above, that it is only set on WAN1 and there does not seem an easy way to set for both LTE AND WAN1.

To try to prove this I will route box via LTE only AND try altering the IGMP settings - not tried that yet.

"To try to prove this I will route box via LTE only AND try altering the IGMP settings"

Nope! Hypothesis wrong! Still "failed"....

If I had a VPN setup on router (which I don't- I have on several clients- but due to bandwidth limitations not on router) I'd try that in case Sky is trying to block traffic from 4G by IP/Servers. Would I be able to setup some form of proxy to test this theory?

therave wrote:
Same result as original post i.e. have a network, I can browse, select a download and then it fails to start. It must have something to do with the multi-cast setting...

Not necessarily ...

The other difference, I suspect, is the use of Carrier-grade NAT on your 4G connection (or have you got one of the expensive 'real' connections to the internet?)

What we need to know, is exactly what mechanism the Sky box is using to download programmes. There is presumably something to stop just any (unsubscribed) Thomas,Richard or Harold from downloading stuff from their servers. Maybe something that there is no NAT-helper for on the LTE connection?

Adding a VPN may make things worse - as in, VPN's often stop services that rely on Broadcast/Multicast from working - unless there is an additional software Proxy to assist in the process.

I had a brief google to see if I could find something on Sky's download mechanism, but failed . Wireshark time ? :wink:

Before pressing "Submit", I noticed this: https://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Sky/4G-broadband-and-how-to-connect-it-to-my-sky-HD-box

(In a nutshell, it says it should work - unless it's blocked by the ISP. Why they would block it, is a mystery - but an intriguing thought!)