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RAX120-100N Reboots
Purchased a Nighthawk RAX120-100N yesterday at Best Buy. It is randomly rebooting. My XR500 in same location did not have this issue. I am plugged into a APC UPS system. It has rebooted 3 times i...
If that doesn't help, I'd exchange it at where you got it.
Maybe you got a sketchy one or one with a bad power supply. It'd be faster to exchange than go through support/rma.
I have no concerns sticking with Netgear. Probably gone through 10 of their routers on my home setup (going back to a N100) and have set them up for family and 2 for my work.
Pretty sure I grabbed the last AX6000 on the shelf when I was there (Best Buy), I was looking for the AX6600. That was out of stock. I will return it tonight and can order a new one from their website.
Any real world difference between the AX6600 and the AX6000 that should steer me one way or the other?
If I have another failure, I will look at the other brands.
Thanks
In terms of real word performance, there isn't much difference from AX5700 to the AX6600.
its not usually the router that bottlenecks speeds.
the AX6000 is a dual band and the AX5700/6600 are triband.
There's a bit of a debate about the benefits of triband versus dual band.
I've had/have both and haven't notice much difference.
Sometimes its nice if you have several high bandwidth devices that can really saturate a band to be able to put them on different 5ghz bands. But most devices aren't really saturating the full spectrum. The only time I do that is if I'm doing major data transfers and I try do to that over hardwired connections or with a backup hard drive.
so which to choose? tough to say.
I would try doing a quick check on amazon. they've had quite a few "renewed" netgear routers on there. Not as long as warranty period but you can buy aftermarket warranties and still be quite a bit cheaper than a new device. Plus you usually know fairly quickly if a device is bad and amazon's return policy is pretty solid.
My desktop where I do any major file transfers (I rip my movies and put them on a WD external drive via USB for Plex server access) is wired so dual band vs tri band is just schematics it appears.
Decided to give Netgear another go. Shelfs in Best Buy were a little bare, but they had a RAX-48. Dual Band 6 Channel AX. OK, will give it a shot. Set it up and had issues getting to the 192.168.1.1 screen, disconnected VPN and it worked. Never had that issue before.
My AX capable phone kept dropping connection, saying no internet access (with it sitting next to the router). But other wireless devices were fine in the same room. Our bedroom Roku TV was reporting speeds of 38 Mbps when I normally get 80-90 on the XR500. This morning the Echo Dot in our bedroom wasn't connected and my phone still could not connect for longer than a minute or two, when it was connected I couldn't get a speedtest over 50-70. Chromebook is getting 170+ with same location on AC speeds. The bedroom is about 30 feet away with 2 walls between it. However, a bedroom further away had signal just fine.
I got a RAX30 for my work and no issues in our 9000 square foot warehouse. Getting 720 Mbps network speed sitting 15 feet away from it.
Am I missing something? Expecting too much from the AX band?
Thanks
What firmware is on it?
Are you using smart connect? Smart connect can take a bit before devices are connected to the correct band for their bandwidth requirements.
how about wpa3? Try disabling it and using wpa2.
plemans wrote:What firmware is on it?
Are you using smart connect? Smart connect can take a bit before devices are connected to the correct band for their bandwidth requirements.
how about wpa3? Try disabling it and using wpa2.
Firmware, didn't write it down, but it updated to newest firmware as part of the setup process.
Smart Connect (sorry, not fully sure but assuming) set to allow the router itself to manage 2.4 and 5 based upon the end device. However, I have Guest enabled for both bands and those did not have this option. I saw the same results regardless of the SSID I connected to (main, guest 2.4, guest 5). This mornings difficulties was about 8 hours after setting it up.
I always run wpa2 with a simple password.
One last try.
The RAX devices when they were released, were released even before the AX spec was finalized. so their firmware changed quite a bit. If best buy had that device on the shelf for a while, it might have had the original release firmware on it. In those cases, the routers responded well to a factory reset after updating from the original.
So try a factory reset/reinstall. If it doesn't help, I'd try a different brand (if it was me)
Sounds like a worthy effort to try. I will give that a shot.
Thanks
I ended up going to a different Best Buy and talked to the Geek Squad guy there. This one actually knew what he was talking about!
They had a much better selection at this one and I got the RAX-70, AX6600. Set up perfectly and is running great. Wish the range for the super fast speeds was a little better, but I am getting 40-50 mpbs on 5ghz band 2 at the furthest room in the house from the router.
Not sure how I ended up with 2 duds in a row, but happy so far with this one. Thanks for your help.
For overall WiFi range, after a bunch of attenuation, speeds will drop to slower speeds like you experienced. If the router has user replaceable antennas, you can improve it a little by getting some 9 dBi antennas if you have a single level home (as long as they are rated for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz operation", most cheap generic ones are 2.4GHz only, and some that advertise 5GHz, will not have any element that matches the 5GHz wavelength efficiently.
One of the main issues with maintaining a high throughput over a long is due to rather unfair/ overly restrictive FCC regulations on transmit power, this is why for home settings, it is becoming more and more common to see mesh setups or 1-2 extra wired APs.
PS, if much of your ranged use will be in a location where you are only getting 40-50Mbps, try changing the router from 160MHz channel width (Up to 4800Mbps in the wireless setup), to 80MHz channel width (Up to 2400Mbps). While it will reduce some of your close range speed as for 2 stream Wifi adapters, the PHY rate will drop to 1200Mbps, since the non-DFS channels allow for higher transmit power, than the DFS channels (another horrible FCC restriction), the higher transmit power will allow for you to maintain a higher PHY at those longer distances where DFS channels are capped at 250mW while non-DFS allow for 1000mW. While there will still be some limitations, especially for mobile devices where smartphone makers don't want the WiFi radio pulling as much power as the CPU of the phone, thus they may have a low max transmit power anyway to save battery life, for devices that are not heavily limited, they will be able to maintain some really good speeds across a much longer range.
