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Forum Discussion
Very Disappointed with XR500
Purchased a XR500 a couple days ago to upgrade an older R7000, really had high hopes for the router, but to my dismay it looks like I will be returning it. Setup went smooth, it was after the set up that everything went to crap. Anything hard wired to the router worked perfect, anything hooked to WiFi, not so much. First, neither my wife's or my phone would connect, then multiple smart switches through out the house would continously not connect or drop off the router, then our Echo's disconnected and wouldn't reconnect, and my wireless camera's would constantly disconnect. I tried every "fix" I could find; I did a factory reset, I made sure firmware was current, I even tried the static IP trick, nothing worked. Since the XR500 is a bust, does anyone have any suggestions for a good router that will handle heavy gaming and streaming? My R7000 is hooked back up at the moment, and everything is back to normal. I really hate to have to take it back, wish I could have figured out the problem. It seems like it would be a phenominal router, if only it worked correctly.
32 Replies
- Have you contacted Netgear support about this? I surmise you would probably have a better experience by disabling Smart Connect and having the individual bands to connect to and use a WiFi analyser to select the least congested channel
What channels are you using? Tyr manual channel 1, 6 or 11 on 2.4ghz and 48 or 149 on 5ghz.
Any wifi neighbor near by?
Whats the Mfr and model# of the ISP modem your using?
I had great wifi on my XR500 when I had a demo unit. I used shipping FW at the time and the wifi was even better then my R7800.
You can try going back to initial FW and see.
I think both channels were set to auto if I remember correctly. I don't have the router hooked up, so it would be a few before I got it set back up and looked. But I will try the channels. As for the modem it is an Arris TM1602. I thought about retrograding my FW, but I kept reading people having the same problem with older versions, so I never did it.
Let us now the results when you can.
Sorry for the delay in the update, did not have time to work on it last night, and have been at work all day today. So I went back and did a factory reset again, went through the set up process and now it seems everything is working, with the exception of our phones, both phones are Samsung S8's. They will connect to the WiFi, but says "internet may not be available". I know that the internet is available because I am typing this message over WiFi on my laptop. I have sent in a support request email, so I guess it's a waiting game now to see what they say. I did try to turn off Smart Connect and also tried different channels, as suggested, neither worked.
Thanks for the update. Hopefully support assists. One thing that might be worth trying is going into each phone's WiFi settings and scan for available routers (SSiDs). Under the XR500 - click on it and tell it to Forget the Device. In other words, clear any memory of the router from your phone's memory.
Then try to connect to it fresh again and re-enter the password etc. I've had issues before where my phone gets confused and this has fixed it.
What is the Mfr and model# of the ISP modem?
Try this as a quick test, enable smart connect. Use a single SSID name. This time, disable ALL WPA security temporarily. Connect the phones. Do they connect and have internet access? If so, re-enable WPA and TPIK only and do same test with phones. Then try WPA2 and AES only.
Use manual channels 1, 6 or 11 on 2.4ghz and 48 on 5Ghz.
I would disable MIMO as well.
FURRY, all of that was already tried, did not work. We did finally make some headway today though. Playing with the Anit-Bufferbloat settings, everything started working. Then of course right when I got it all working, we had a power outage for whatever reason, now it is not working again. I went back into the router to make sure all the settings were the same, which they were, but still not allowing my phone to access internet again.
What is the Mfr and model# of the ISP modem?
Turn off all QoS....
