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Forum Discussion
Scobleizer
Oct 25, 2019Aspirant
All sorts of connection problems with RAX80 and EAX80s
I'm having a ton of problems. Had this setup for about two weeks now, RAX80 hooked up to an AT&T fiber line and two EAX80s. When they work everything is amazing and fast. The problem is they almost a...
xjn
Jun 04, 2020Apprentice
Try hardwired connection and set it in AP mode instead of connecting to RAX80 wirelessly
carys4
Jun 04, 2020Star
Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of having it as a wireless extender if you're going to hardwire it anyways?
- xjnJun 05, 2020Apprentice
carys4 wrote:
Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of having it as a wireless extender if you're going to hardwire it anyways?I have the EAX80 as an AP so that devices in rear of house have a stronger connection. It is in same room as RAX80 but set to AP mode and hardwired over Ethernet. My house is small but due to layout would get disconnects in rear... EAX80 solves issue by placing it closer to rear of house and higher up than RAX80 which is near middle of house and closer to ground.
Using channel scanner I looked for free channels and set EAX80 to lower channels and RAX80 to higher channels to avoid interference. So far it works pretty well... the speeds are slightly less than RAX80 but I usually connect main devices to RAX80 and other less important stuff to EAX80.I have smart connect turned off and separate names for all four networks ... two 2.4GHz and two 5GHz with each device set to only one network to keep them from roaming. The EAX80 networks are hidden but saved in phone and set not to auto join. If I am in rear of house on primary device and drop from RAX80 then I manually switch to EAX80.
It would be nice if didn't have to hardwire and could move it farther away but then would have more interference due to it connecting wirelessly to EAX80.... it would be nice to use smart connect and roaming also but more trouble than it's worth and easier to lock devices to router or AP and manually switch networks if needed.
The Comcast Gateway puts out a signal even if in bridge mode and disable hotspot so must change its channels also before putting it in bridge mode. I moved its channels to 11 and 165 so not overlapping with Netgear equipment. Doing that solved most interference issues for me. My Sonos setup is also set to 11 but can not manually set the 5Ghz for surrounds on Sonos.
Sonos has web interface can see what channel it auto selects for surrounds... it usually will move to avoid the other three 5Ghz channels. Occasionally I will see drops in speed and usually will notice Sonos has moved to channel already occupied. Turning it on and off will get it to move back to better channel.
Frustrating have to micromanage everything constantly but I would rather be able to than not. That is reason have toughed out Netgear issues since many other alternative routers such as Eero, Google WiFi, or Amplifi Alien don't even have channel selection which ends up causing more issues if they all jump around each other constantly.
- carys4Jun 05, 2020Star"It would be nice if didn't have to hardwire and could move it farther away but then would have more interference due to it connecting wirelessly to EAX80."
That's exactly my point. For the price we pay for the EAX80 - this is exactly the problem this device was supposed to be able to solve. If you look at how it's advertised and the diagrams of how it's supposed to work, it's supposed to eliminate those interferences wirelessly using its new technology.- xjnJun 05, 2020Apprentice
carys4 wrote:
"It would be nice if didn't have to hardwire and could move it farther away but then would have more interference due to it connecting wirelessly to EAX80."
That's exactly my point. For the price we pay for the EAX80 - this is exactly the problem this device was supposed to be able to solve. If you look at how it's advertised and the diagrams of how it's supposed to work, it's supposed to eliminate those interferences wirelessly using its new technology.Unfortunately almost everything related to routers these days seems to be false advertising... "speeds up to" claims and features missing... read the Duckware article about AX routers... almost seems like whole wifi industry is a scam.