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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...
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.