AX5400 Starts Dropping Wi-Fi During Big Downloads

Question

Hello Netgear Community,&nbsp;&nbsp;I'm hoping to get some help here.&nbsp; I've been trying to figure out a problem that has been plauging my house hold for about 9 months.&nbsp; In short, if both my wife and I are connected via Wi-Fi or LAN to the router and working, internet will start dropping for one or both of us.&nbsp; This most often occurs if we are both on video calls with video going or if downloading files of significant size.&nbsp; I have actually now installed an ethernet port expander.&nbsp; I plug my work computer via LAN into the ethernet port expander and my wife's computer is directly into the Router.&nbsp; With this setup, internet has been considerbly better.&nbsp; If my wife does experience internet issues, my connection via the ethernet port expander is never touched.&nbsp; Therefore I feel the router is the problem.&nbsp; Last night I was downloading a new game to my PS where the PS was connected via LAN to the router.&nbsp; As soon as I started to download the game, every connected Wi-Fi device dropped Wi-Fi for ~10 minutes.&nbsp; Wi-Fi then came back and seemed to maintain the rest of the evening.&nbsp; My game continued to download and was never interuppted.&nbsp; In most cases I do have to reset the Wi-Fi router to get things back in line.&nbsp;I've searched the forums and do see this topic dicussed all over the place.&nbsp; Although none quite match my experience.&nbsp; This issue has persisted across multiple router software updates.&nbsp; It feels like the Wi-Fi router, when pulling large downloads, is trying to manage resources so it start **bleep**ting Wi-Fi down to other devices.&nbsp; OoS is off, but it is set to allow Internet Speed Test to determine bandwidth.&nbsp; That is the default setting.&nbsp; For the life of me I can't determine what's going on.&nbsp; Any advice would be helpful.&nbsp; If I've left any details out please ask and I'll answer.&nbsp;Thanks in advance!

jjjhawk88 · Answer

If I look under Advanced &gt; Wireless Setup &gt; NETGEARXX-5G, I see the channel is set to 44, mode 'Up to 4800 Mbps' and transmit power control 100%.&nbsp; I have never touched these settings and so this would have to be default.&nbsp;I've been watching this really close to see if I can come to any further conclusions as to what is happening.&nbsp; Here is an example of an experiment I ran last night.&nbsp;It was late in the evening and I turned on my PlayStation, which is wired directly into my router.&nbsp; I had a few updates pop up.&nbsp; One was 11GB in size and the other was 6GB in size.&nbsp; I started the downloads and started playing my game.&nbsp; Both downloads completed and installed without issue.&nbsp; A few minutes later two more downloads appeared, one was 12GB and one was 16GB.&nbsp; I started those downloads.&nbsp; The first one of 11GB completed with no issues.&nbsp; The second download reached about 10GB in the download and everything started falling apart.&nbsp; WiFi dropped from my phone, the PlayStation stated the internet connection failed.&nbsp; Interestingly enough, on the PlayStation, I couldn't play an online game or use the voice chat feature, but the download continued and completed during this time.&nbsp; As soon as the download was complete, WiFi came back, the PlayStation showed connected again and I had full use of the internet.&nbsp; It's important to note that everyone in the house was in bed except me.&nbsp; No other devices were being used with WiFi other than those items that are typically connect 24/7.&nbsp; But no other downloads or streaming taking place.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;So, this all took place while I was downloading a large file via a wired connection to the router and not over WiFi.&nbsp; This leads me to believe the router is prioritizing the large downloads and shutting all other channels off to optimize performance.&nbsp; I thought this might be a QoS issue, but QoS is set to 'Let Speedtest detect my internet bandwidth'.&nbsp; Could this setting be causing this issue?&nbsp; We used to never have a problem and then out of nowhere this started happening.&nbsp; We've tried two seperate Netgear WiFi routers and both respond in this way.&nbsp; One last note, I have 1 computer in the house wired to the internet coming in the house, but is not connected to the Netgear router via WiFi or LAN.&nbsp; When this issue happens, this computer completely seperated from the Negear router is not impacted at all.&nbsp; So again, this leads me to believe it's the router and not the ISP.&nbsp;&nbsp;

jjjhawk88 · Answer

It's probably important to also note this is our second Netgear router this issue is occuring with.&nbsp; When the issue first started, we were using a Netgear AC2300 Model: R7000P. We wondered if it were hardware related so we purchased this new AX5400.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Christian_R · Answer

Hello jjjhawk88,

&nbsp;

Welcome to the community! Have you had a moment to get in contact with our support team regarding this?&nbsp;

&nbsp;

https://www.netgear.com/support/contact.aspx

&nbsp;

Christian&nbsp;

Razor512 · Answer

Is the router using any DFS channels?&nbsp;If possible, check the router page (often 192.168.1.1) and head to the advanced tab.&nbsp;After that, scroll down to the page labeled Wireless Settings (5GHz), and tell us which channels are beingused.&nbsp;If it is using a DFS channel and your home is located within 10 miles of an airport, or on a flght path used for landings, you will be very likely to encounter issues with DFS channels which will cause clients to randomly disconnect when the router detects any radar use.&nbsp;Also if using smart connect, some older clients may not reconect fast enough during a band steering event if the router tries to move them to a different band, that can also cause connection issues, in which case, you may need to disable it.

jjjhawk88 · Answer

Thanks for the reply&nbsp;Christian_R&nbsp;. I did contact Netgear support when this first started to happen.&nbsp; At that time there was little information to go on, so they required that I make sure it wasn't the ISP and then give them a call back once I had excluded the ISP as the issue.&nbsp; I don't necessarily know how to definitivley do that, but I'm pretty sure my current setup excluded the ISP since anything connected to the router Wi-Fi is shut off but anything connected to my LAN port extender is fine and has no trouble.&nbsp; I may try and give them another call, but I feel like it's a setting that I'm not yet identifying driving the issue.&nbsp; I thought a post here might provide an quicker answer.&nbsp;Thanks again!

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AX5400 Starts Dropping Wi-Fi During Big Downloads

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