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Forum Discussion
RAX48 5GHz wifi unstable with MacBook Pro M1
MacBook lost internet connection intermittently while connected to 5GHz wifi. No issue with other devices or when MacBook is on 2.4GHz wifi.
If that's the issue, is it a bug in SmartConnect?
Potentially, it depends on how these issues are handled. Normally a client device should respect a band steer when the router tells it to use a specific band, but some devices may not, and in those cases, either that device will need a WiFi driver update to better handle bandsteering, or the router will need a workaround to not retry bandsteering on certain devices.
Netgear uses the smart connect to segment older standard devices and newer ones as well as handling band steering when the device is far enough away that the 2.4GHz band will be more reliable than the 5GHz band. Under normal conditions, it improves overall simultaneous throughput when many devices are active at the same time, as you get fewer airtime sharing issues.
Currently the vast majority of devices work well with smart connect.
So the pros outweighs the cons for SmartConnect?
Yes, the pros outweigh the cons.The pros gain more weight relatively speaking, as you have more and more devices connected via WiFi. For example, if you have just 4 or 5 devices on WiFi, it will not make much of a difference (provided it still allows you to keep the same SSID for both bands while smart connect is disabled). With smart connect disabled, devices choose bands in a completely self directed manner, e.g., some devices will always try to stick with the 5GHz band if the RSSI is above a certain threshold. If smart connect is on and they its band steering and the AP wants it on 2.4GHz and the device wants to be on 5GHz, then it could end up bouncing between the bands periodically.
The main areas where you will notice effenciy benefits from smart connect, is if you have gigabit internet, or have a bunch of devices on WiFi that do frequent backups to your NAS. If all are backing up at the same time, you will notice higher overall throughput at the NAS's Ethernet port if the devices are efficiently distributed across the different bands.
If you have no NAS and are using an internet connection in the sub 300Mbit range, then it will be hard to tell a performance difference between smart connect on or off unless you have like 20+ active WiFi devices alldemanding airtime at the same time.
While every company has their own trade secret methods for decision making, but the ultimate goal is to balance each device having the best band for it, while also avoiding mixed setups that will ad a tonof overhead. While newer WiFi radios will deal with mixed setups better, it can never be fully eliminated.
For example, with with 2 of the same type of WiFi clients, e.g., 2 802.11ax devices, then additional overhead will be extremely tiny, but if you do something like put a 802.11ax and 802.11n client on the same band, then the overhead will be larger as it needs to rapidly manage 2 different standards while also dealing with devices that need more airtime tooffer a good experience, thus an overall drop in aggregate throughput.
With smart connect like features, if you have a bunch of 802.11ax, ac, and n devices, it may decide to push the n devices to the 2.4GHz band in order to avoid the larger overhead issues, but it also has to be smart enough to deviate from those decisions in order to ensure that a device doesn't give up coverage.
I connected to 5GHz guest network and had the same disconnect issue. There is no SmartConnect for guest network.