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Forum Discussion
Terrible WiFi with RAX12 after switching off Xfinity AP
I deciced to replace the AP on my Comcast XB6 with the RAX120. Everything went great at first! I was hitting 870+ Mbps on WiFi 6 and 600-700 on 802.11 AC devices. Latency was low and legacy device...
LOL on the prefers 2.4. Most devices seem to blindly grab 2.4 when they see a stronger SNNR. With WiFi 6 it isn't as bad, but not optimal. I've got my desktop and router within 10 feet of each other and they will still go to 2.4 without a bit of configuring and "forget this" on my part.
I could sware I did port 1 only on the XB6 only and it still failed.
I've replaced all of my desktop clients now with Intel AX200 cards. They will outperform the direct ethernet connection but I'm suffering from random failures on all systems now. They can be easily bounded by an on/off of the wifi connection. But it only happens when connected to the RAX in ax mode. I think these failures are realted to the cards and perhaps not 100% the RAX.
If I could combine the best of the XB6 and RAX, it would be an amazing device. Netgear needs to get their act together on a few things.
It's going back to Best Buy today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have that odd relieved feeling one gets when breaking off a bad relationship.
michail71 wrote:It's going back to Best Buy today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have that odd relieved feeling one gets when breaking off a bad relationship.
I feel for you.
I had an Orbi setup when it first came out and it worked flawlessly. Subsequent forced firmware updates made it unusable for the household with continuing satellite disconnects about 6 months later.
It's when I decided to wire the house and go for a prosumer setup. Working flawlessly ever since.
Yeah, I would but I'm renting and the runs wouldn't be easy in the house. Otherwise I'd go for a CAT6A or CAT8 setup.
When the RAX worked I could get faster speeds from the WiFi than I could wired directly to it. It was just blazing fast as could be untill it decided to drop 5GHz. Which seems to be about 3 to 15 times per day. The PCs on WiFi 6 would get the sudden slowdown, all randomly, which we could reset at the adapter quickly. Then all 5GHz connections would crash at once 1 or 2 times per day. The 2.4 GHz band seemed okay.
I think anyone running a single SSID may not notice these problems as much as this is a good 2.4 GHz AP. But I refuse to run fixed based systems on 2.4 GHz with excellent signal strength available. It may be why it works for some people. Neatgear may be masking the issue on 5 GHz that way?
I had a similar experience with an Orbi mesh system a cople years ago. It just prooved to be too unstable.
Final report as I took it back to the store but I wanted to try one more thing (besides run over it with my car).
I thought perhaps using one SSID may help with stability so I combined both frequencies. I did see a stumble on my PC where it dropped from and 5 GHz AX and then connected to 2.4 GHz. However, I did lose connection at the time, I could tell because I was RDPd to several servers on an Azure data center while working on a project. It took a bit to regain the remote desktop sessions.
Performance on 2.4 GHz AX was okay, but not $500 router from 10 feet away okay. My Surface Book 2 would also only connect on 2.4 GHz channel in that configuration. Ever Surface device I've had needs to be forced on 5 GHz, even if it's next to the AP.
The 802.11AC connections would all drop at the same time. I can tell because I have 4 Alexa devices. They all like to go off at once and complain when the internet goes down. Which happened two times while I was doing the combined SSID test.
