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Skhhsions's avatar
Skhhsions
Aspirant
Dec 04, 2017

MR1100 not connecting to 2.4 ghz band

I have recently purchased the new Netgear Highthawk router/hotspot through AT&T Mobility.  The unit is great and worked for about 5 days before it stopped allowing access to the internet.  I have a cell tower right across the river from where I live and get full bars everywhere in my house.  I was not being throttled by a data limit either.  One day it just stopped providing access to the internet and I only had 9 devices connected to it (it allows for 20 devices).

 

I returned it since it was within 14 days of purchase and got another one.  I have had this one for about a week now and it is doing the same thing.  I called AT&T Tech Support who were great and they said to try changing the channel I am on to see if there is interference.  When I started messing around with the channels I realized that the only problem I had was on the 2.4 ghz band.  The 5 ghz band was fantastic with great speeds but the 2.4 ghz band didn't allow for evne a simple webpage (Google) to load.  Every device on teh 5 ghs (Amazon Firestick, new laptop, Samsung Galaxy S8+ cell phone) worked like a charm and was very fast.  The older laptop and Arlo cameras that are forced to be on the 2.4 band won't work at all.  I changed the channel and it helps for about 10 minutes.

 

I downloaded a wifi analyzer and learned that the channel I was on was bad.  I changed it to a good channel and as soon as I do that, that channel goes bad or lists as being a bad channel.  I have not contacted Netgear about this but spent a significant amount of time on the phone with AT&T Tech Support.  They said it is such a new device for them that they don't have a lot of information to get to help me.

 

Has anyone else had issues with this device or the 2.4 ghz band?  I looked at some community notes and have seen that a different "nighthawk" router by Netgear had this issue and it was resolved with a firmware update but have seen nothing for my particular model (MR1100). 

 

Thanks for any help that can be provided.

Hardware

2 Replies

  • UK-based's avatar
    UK-based
    Luminary
    Dec 13, 2017

    Are you living close to lots of other neighboring routers? The fact that the 5GHz signal doesn't easily pass through obstacles would explain why your signal wouldn't be too badly affected by other routers, but of course, the 2.4GHz travels much further. Does your Wi-Fi analyzer allow you to see the other SSID's from neighboring routers, or at least tell you how many other routers are using the same 2.4GHz channel? If not, it would be worth finding an app that does. I'm using one from Netgear but they seem to have removed this from the Play Store (Android only). There's another Android app called WifiAnalyzer (open source) from VREM - I haven't used this myself but it seems to have similar features.

     

    I suppose the only problem with manually selecting a specific channel rather than leaving the M1 to auto select the best channel is that the neighboring routers are probably also hopping around to find the best channel and they could end up conflicting with your fixed channel setting.