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Forum Discussion
RAX80 - slow speeds
Model RAX80 - Firmware - 1.0.1.60 Purchased August 2,2019 I bought this router a few weeks ago and noticed that I wasnt getting the speeds. This morning I had our ISP out to the house to confirm tha...
Interesting,
My older Lenovo laptop was getting less than half a gig when hard wired to the router. My newer laptop gets the 850+ when hard wired to the router. So in my case, I became less concerned about the direct connection causing my terrible 2.4 Ghz signal.
How are are your 5 Ghz and 2.4 Ghz signals?
Also, I was able to get Costco to exchange the router, it should come in a few days. I'll provide an update once I get that set up, to see if it's any better.
My Lenovo ThinkPad X1-2 does better on wi-fi than it does wired. Wired, I get approximately 500 Mbs, while on (CAT-6) copper it only gets about 350-380 Mbs. It does have a 1 Gb NIC built in, which means these figures are standing on their heads, although the Wifi-5 speed is more nearly what it should be than the wired speed is. I have a regular (Intel) desktop machine which gets similar low performance.
Today, time permitting, I'm going to move the router to another location and see if the speeds change. - The only way to be certain it's the RAX80 or not is to identify where the bottleneck is.
Netgear has been known for making quality network devices for quite while now. Their hardware is normally very good; this is especially true for the higher-level models. My misgivings are mainly over the use of Open-Source firmware running on a small version of Linux. Sure, it's cheaper, but there's no one-size-fits-all solution that's going to be best-suited to a specific router. While there may be rough spots in that more-or-less generic code, the devil in the details lie in the specific hardware-level device drivers. A lot of the reliability and performance is relies on the device-specific drivers and the microcode beneath it. - If the problem isn't in the hardware itself, it is in the software layers above; and especially in the interractions between the layers.
I've done a lot of development and beta testing over the years, but I didn't know I was buying into a deployment scheme that was launched to early and should still be in the development stage.
If they can't get this thing running reliably and as fast as advertised, I'm going to ask for my money back.
Thanks for the detailed reply! That helps me know a bit more of what's going on and how all these pieces fit together.
With my issue, they did have me install 2 different firmware versions. The second version helped my 5 GHz speed, but did little or worse to the 2.4 Ghz (I can't recall all the exact 2.4 speeds before and after the firmware changes).
The speed INTO the router seems fine, it's all the different speeds coming OUT, like ethernet, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz that I can't resolve. My ethernet and 5 GHz are fine, but the 2.4 GHz won't get past 30 mpbs on any device.
If you do end up returning this one, please let me know what you get? As I am not incredibly confident my replacement router will be any better. :-(