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Forum Discussion
RAX70 smart connect
When in settings and enabling the smart connect feature, all appliances on the wifi disconnect and will not re-connect even when manually attempting to do so
ok, I've switched back to smart connect, and my laptop is connected to the routeur on a 2400 mbps connection speed. BUT now I'm confronted to the same problem which made me buy this Netgear routeur and sell the old one (Asus): on startup, the laptop will connect to the routeur (strong signal, 2400 mbps), but no internet. Onedrive won't log in, Speedtest won't work, Google Chrome won't load a single page. I need to click on the routeur connection (Netgear80 in my case), disconnect, then reconnect. Only then I will have Internet. The problem probably comes from the laptop, more precisely from the wifi 6 card.
That is strange, especially since the smart connect should not be needed to connect to the faster radio, all that is needed is to give it a different SSID if you want to specifically connect to it with no deviation unless the client device decides to roam on its own.
Or if you want some slightly better client directed band steering, disabling smart connect, then giving the 2.4GHz and the fast 5GHz radio the same SSID, then giving the slower 5GHz radio a different SSID.
Then connecting to the SSID that the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio is sharing.
Then in your Ethernet adapter settings, setting the preferred band to 5GHz. This will cause it to stick with the 5GHz band unless the dignal drops to the -80 range before it drops to the 2.4GHz band.
Beyond that, smart connect has 100% no impact on the PHY rate of a WiFi radio in the router, it is effectively just a bandsteering feature to more efficiently organize devices to achieve the best overall throughput for all devices, e.g., making sure an old dual band device that uses the ancient 802.11a from being pushed to the 5GHz band that your 802.11ax device is also using, which will cause poor performance due to the airtime sharing, as well as avoiding other suboptimal scenarios.
ok... I've let a few days passing by, and it seems like it's another routeur! smart connect now forces the 5G-2 to connect, and I've reached speeds I've never expected (935 mbps download!). Thanks for your help.