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Forum Discussion
Nighthawk RAX50 WiFi speed question
Hi guys,
I am new to the forum and just installed my first RAX50 router. I replaced the standard Spectrum router / AP in an attempt to improve my coverage and get better speeds on wifi. I have run into a couple of things that I don't understand. I hope someone here can shed some light on them.
1. When I run the speedtest on the router using the App, I consistently get >300 Mbs download and about 12 Mbs upload. However, my devices on Wifi are reporting significantly less speeds. My phone connected on the 2G network gets about 30 Mbs / 10 Mbs (using Ookla Speedtest), connected on the 5G (when just 10 feet from the router) I get a reading similar to the router at about 300M / 10M. Is this normal due to the capability of the 2G vs 5G speeds?
2. I got everything setup and running. My setup includes a couple of Wifi Cameras, a WiFi door lock., a WiFi thermostat and a Wifi garage door opener which run only on 2G, and a bunch of the usual devices that will work on either 2G or 5G. Everything worked well for a couple days. I then was poking around in the App and noticed the setting "Enable Smart Connect", so I said to myself, why not, and turned it on. Within a hour the thermostat and the wifi cameras dropped their connection... (It might have been immediate but I'm not sure) Should I assume this is an issue with the devices and not the router? I turned the "Smart Connect" option off and reconnected the devices and they have stayed connected just fine for about a day now.
3. I have a had a couple of times when my phone would report "connected without internet" when it is connected to the 5G WiFi. I change the settings to connect to 2G and it seems fine, but once I re-connect to the 5G it eventually reports "connected without internet". Should I suspect my phone? (It's a Samsung A32 Android, a few years old) Let's face it, I don't "need" the 5G speeds on my phone, but just curious if any of you have experienced this.
Other than these "oddities" the coverage seems very good in my 1900 sq ft 3 BR concrete FL home.
Thanks for any thoughts.
Pete
2 Replies
- 2.4 GHz is considerably slower than 5 GHz, but has better range. Put your slow devices on it and the fast ones on 5 GHz.
Smart Connect changes internals so you'll have to reconfigure/reconnect your gizmoz again. I have IoT devices myself and they work with SC when I set them up again.
Could be the phone or something else. Hard to tell.
Pgeorge33 wrote:
1. When I run the speedtest on the router using the App, I consistently get >300 Mbs download and about 12 Mbs upload. However, my devices on Wifi are reporting significantly less speeds.
When you run a speedtest on the Nighthawk App, if that is what up refer to, you are telling the router to test the speed that it detects over the wired connection to the Internet. It should be the speed that you pat for, and is about the same as you will get if you ran a speedtest on a device that has a wired connection to the router.
If you used your mobile to run something like the Speedtest app, it will measure the wifi speeds, and that depends on the wifi clients involved.
