RAX80 5 Ghz band... Bug preventing the 5Ghz band from running at full speed

Question

After a long, diligent and frustrating effort to get Netgear Support to resolve a problem with my original RAX80, they finally sent a replacement. The new unit does not have the slowdown problem of the original. (And) Straight out of the box, the 5 Ghz band ran at the full, rated 4800 Mbps.

This is where problems started: I changed the 5 Ghz band's SSID from NETGEAR75-5G to my own The_Whites-5G. I hit apply and the resulting 5 Ghz band signal would not connect to anything. In fact, the 5 gig signal took minutes to come up and kept disappearing every few minutes from my Wi-Fi scanner. (WiFi Commander for PC, it's a great utility.)

Now, I know there was nothing exotic about my personal SSID, but I could only make a sucessful connection again if I backed the speed down to the "Up to 2400 Mbps" setting. Furthermore, attempting to use the original default SSID, NETGEAR75-5G made no difference. The only fix was to do a hard reset to original factory default.

Question: Has anyone else had this problem? Did you resolve it? Please RSVP with any comments... - Thanks!

plemans · Answer

have you tried setting the ssid up avoiding any special characters? Just letters/numbers?

Another thing is that the 4800mbps speed is dependant on using DFS channels. Is there a airport/base near you? If so, it could be auto switching off those dfs channels and that's why you're seeeing it disappear every few minutes.

PDWhite · Answer

Well, we don't have any airports near here. Also, I believe I'm using a channel that doesn't conflict with DFS frequencies.

The appearing/disappearing/not connecting problem only manifests itself when the speed is set as "up to 4800 Mbps." Setting for up to 2400 is a steady as a rock.

As far as I know, a standard SSID can be up to 32 8-bit bytes long. Apparently, the characters can be anything from NULLs on up. My hunch is that changing the SSID may actually 'burp' on some other configuration settings; possibly the ones governing the 5 Ghz band configuration. (And) since there is no code available setting to un-break the error, that is why only a hard reset or doing a restore to a good working configuration will fix the problem.

My conclusion is that it may be a bug in the configuration firmware, but if so, why aren't more people having the problem? I'm certain I'm not the only RAX80 owner that has changed the default SSID...

owlpower · Answer

I just got a RAX80 today, and I have been load testing it. I have had no connectivity issues at all with 15+ devices connected.

However, I noticed a detail in your post. I was getting inconsistent and very poor download speeds on 5GHz. They were always below 100 Mbps and sometime like half that amount. I set the Mode from 4800 down to 2400 Mbps and I am consistently getting way faster speeds on wireless download speeds.

Thanks!

PDWhite · Answer

Owlpower,Very interesting. In my case, I did get very good performance with the 5 Ghz band, until I changed the SSID to something other than the default NETGEAR75-5G. After the change, the 5 Ghz would connect with anything. Also, a Wi-Fi monitoring utility would show 5G appear and disappear until I changed the speed to "up to 2400 Mbps." - Obviously there is a problem with the 5G band and 4800 Mbps. Sounds to me like this may be partially a problem with the code that applies the settings from the 5G Wi-Fi settings menu to the config. The firmware ste to its RESET 'default', more or less works correctly because isn't actually affected by the page's configuration code. If I make too many changes back, the only way I can get it working is to do a full hard reset.&nbsp;Presently, I am awaiting a replacement for my RAX80. Sometimes it is very difficult to determine whether the problem lies in the hardware or software, which is firmware in this case. When the new one arrives, I will be able to report on whether the problem is the same on the new one. Up 'til now, the conclusion is that it is defective hardware on the current&nbsp; one.&nbsp;

PDWhite · Answer

This is an update to my previous post.&nbsp;First off, the characters used in the SSID are definitely not the issue. I did find that the RAX80 I had at the time of my post was definately corrupting the configuration, though. Netgear sent me a replacement, (this is the third one in a bit under two months.) On this one, there is no config corruption and it doesn't lock up when attempting to change the 5 Ghz speed up and down, but the 5 Ghz band will not allow 5 Ghz adapters to connect when it is set as up to 4800 Mbps, even though they are Wi-Fi 6 compatible, with current Intel drivers and documentation that says they do. (I may try doing a binary file compare on the good and bag .cfg files just to check out the differences...)&nbsp;&nbsp;Interestingly, this box doesn't connect at 4800 with either the default or my custom SSID.&nbsp; It IS much more stable, generally.&nbsp;I have two new tools that arrived today: One is a new diagnostic Wi-Fi scanner app that can better diagnose the Wi-Fi signals. The other is a brand new PCI Wi-Fi 6 adapter that advertises itself as compatible with the Nighthawk RAX80 and a long list of other units. That will be arriving this afternoon, and I will have a much better chance to find out ith the RAX80's % Ghz band will talk to anything when set to 4800 Mbps. - I'll post more after my experiments. (Note: May not be able to do this right away because my wife wants me to clean the garage... ) :-|&nbsp;&nbsp;

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RAX80 5 Ghz band... Bug preventing the 5Ghz band from running at full speed

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