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AX5400 Starts Dropping Wi-Fi During Big Downloads
Hello Netgear Community, I'm hoping to get some help here. I've been trying to figure out a problem that has been plauging my house hold for about 9 months. In short, if both my wife and I are...
Thank you for the reply Razor512, I don't believe I'm using any DFS channels. This router is at default settings out of the box outside of me selecting Channel 1 as the only channel to use since other channels appeared to potentially have a lot of surrounding interference. This issue existed before I changed the channel and has existed after, although since moving to channel 1 it has been slightly better, but not by much.
I followed your instructions and did find 5GHz, but there were no channels listed. I do live within 10 miles of two small airports. But, these drop outs only occur when either downloading a large file for a gaming system or when both my wife and I are on Zoom calls and streaming videos. Under any other circumstance it's fine.
One side effect of this issue that cropped up is that devices that are often powered off (printers, PS4) when powered on they will not get an IP address. I have to reboot the router and the device in order for it to dump the self assigned IP and pick up a valid IP. This never happened until we started working from home and demanding more from our ISP and router.
By default, if that router is using any channel between 36 and 48 on the 5GHz band then by default, it is using DFS channels, as it defaults to 160MHz vhannel width.
This is why you will often see something like this on the advanced tab. 36 + 40 + 44(P) + 48 + 52 + 56 + 60 + 64
In those cases, the only way to change that behavior, is to leave the default settings, and change the mode from "Up to 4800Mbps" to "Up to 2400Mbps" that will set the router to use 80MHz channel width and thus not use DFS channels.
As for the IP address issues, check if those devices are getting a 169.254 IP address. If they are, then it means something is prevent them from receiving replies to their DHCP requests.
If the issue is the DHCP server in the router, then the issue will also impact wired PCs, e.g., if you restart a wired PC, or simply open a cmd window and enter the following commands:
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
If they fail to get an IP over Ethernet, then it could mean for some reason the DHCP server in the router has stopped responding.