Earlier this year I purchased a RAX120 and almost immediately started facing “early adopter” issues with the firmware. I attempted to work with the community in addressing the DNS issues and WiFi speed drops the hardware was experiencing. This was back on firmware .115/.118, and at the time with the transition to work from home I had no choice but to return the router in favor of something more stable. 7 months later, I see firmware .136 is current and I would like to go back to the RAX120 because of its support for WAN aggregation and a multi-gig port. Are the issues most were experiencing at the start of the year for the most part worked out? Would you consider it stable enough to rely on for teleworking without the need to reboot/reconfigure the device on a regular basis?

Thanks for the feedback! I’m running an ARRIS SURFboard SB8200. When resetting I’ve tried rebooting them as a pair and standalone, and the only method that resolves the issue is when the router is reset, regardless of if the modem is as well which to me points to the router as the culprit. Very good catch on my DNS settings, though that’s a result of attempted troubleshooting and not how I normally run things. I typically run through a Pi-hole pointed at a single provider but haven’t been running it to try and eliminate as many variables as possible. Earlier this month when I received this second router, I ran on ISP DNS servers until I encountered the issues. As the first telltale symptom of my problem is the huge spike in latency, I wanted to see if it could be a DNS problem and began changing my primary servers around. When choosing a speed test server, however, it still always picks the one not too far from me. I attempted switching off AX on my previous troubleshooting of my first device, but worth a shot this time around I suppose since I still am not running any AX devices. Will take your suggestions and disable AX, PMF, and MU-Mimio and report back if there’s any changes. Thanks again for your input

Just factory reset and configured without WAN aggregation, we’ll see if that’s the culprit. I tried this on my last unit but continued to have issues even on a single WAN input. I believe DNS issues were to fault back then that I was having in addition to this problem, so I wasn’t able to pinpoint what was causing the issues. Will update in a few days’ time if it ends up being what’s triggering these stability issues.

Two routers could go wrong there are bad batches sometimes with hardware from nay comany, but I have never experienced your issue, I wonder if its specific to your set up. What modem have you got? Have you tried turning off AX? Since the last two firmwares AX is on by default, it could be your hardware is not working well with AX? You can make the RAX120 a AC router by just turning off AX, make sure you turn off PMF and MU-Mimo, also don't force 160Mhz. I also am confused with your DNS setup why have Cloudflare, which is private from your ISP's gaze and then googles which the world and its dog can see? In fact why change them from your ISP? Try running just the servers your ISP gives you and dont play with those settings to see if because you are using a third part DNS server they maybe are further away so CDN delivery is being affected in speedtests and downloads as its not selecting the closest servers to you, which yoiur ISP would. In all honesty if your ISP run servers with DNNSEC there is no pint in changing them. If I were to change Open DNS I think works better, I tend to leave this stuff alone as it givs very little gain to the user anyway. Try DNS first to see what happens then work backwards to it just being an ac router if problems persist

Hello MCBurn, Welcome back to the community! So far, our support team has received positive feedback regarding the latest firmware version. Christian

After two weeks the logs still vanish and reappear though, but that does not effect stability, it just means its hardwork diagnosing ISP/LAN/WLAN issues. <sigh>

RAX120 Stability | NETGEAR Communities

19 Replies

Christian_R
NETGEAR Employee Retired
Oct 08, 2020
Hello MCBurn,

Welcome back to the community! So far, our support team has received positive feedback regarding the latest firmware version.

Christian
- Killhippie
  Prodigy
  Oct 09, 2020
  After two weeks the logs still vanish and reappear though, but that does not effect stability, it just means its hardwork diagnosing ISP/LAN/WLAN issues. <sigh>
  - MCBurn
    Star
    Oct 09, 2020
    Thanks for the feedback, all. Just picked up another RAX120 and so far, so good (*knocks on wood*). Downloads are back in the ~1200Mbps range thanks to WAN aggregation so pretty happy so long as its ghosts from the past don't reappear.
- dcinca
  Apprentice
  Oct 12, 2020
  The most stable firmware is .108, but the signal of 2.4G is weaker than other version. No reboot, no d/c.
  The newest firmware .136 has a big improvement from .122/.128, I have noticed only 2 reboots since it's out.
  - MCBurn
    Star
    Oct 13, 2020
    Well, here we are again a few days into my second attempt at running a RAX120 and back to having issues. It appears about once per day the router will fall flat on its face and connection speeds will drop to <10 Mbps until it’s rebooted.
    
    Noticed connectivity issues arising tonight so ran a speed test (on a wired connection): ping of 211, 8.36 down, and 6.41 up.
    
    Checked logs and rebooted. Logs were very uneventful since the last reboot to correct the same issue a couple days prior.
    
    Upon coming back up, ran another speed test. This time is back to normal: ping of 15, 1,148.78 down, and 37.93 up.
    
    I've attached the router log that has everything since last failure minus the DoS entries. Have also attached speed test results from minutes apart showing before and after reboot.
    
    Any ideas? Should I try rolling back to .108? I don’t have any devices using 2.4G and have the radio disabled, so not concerned with .108 shortcomings in that regard. May just give up on this line of routers for good if it can't go more than a day or two without requiring a reboot.
    
    routerlog.pdf38 KB

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RAX120 Stability