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Forum Discussion
Wi-Fi signal low
My Wi-Fi signal is getting lower and lower over time. Warranty just ran out, bought unit 5/2021. Hard wired to modem, my 1 gig download speed tests at 800, give or take based on date/time of day....
Like Razor512 put, you didn't give us much about your device.
1. what router do you have?
2. what firmware is on it?
3. what arris modem is it connected to?
I put the models in, but they are not showing?
router is ac0800
modem is Arris sb8200
For the model, it needs to be the product model and not the wireless class. For example the RAXE500, RAX200, RAX120, RAX80, RAX50
Or for older deivce mdoels such as the R7800.
Ac3200 R8000 is router model.
Arris modem is as stated, Sb8200
a 90% drop from 1 Gig to less than 100k Wi-Fi signal is in no way normal or acceptable in any router. My question: how to fix, as Netgear insists it is not defective. Though they are willing to charge me to prove it. I have no idea which firmware version I have. I went into the Nighthawk and Netgear app and made sure it told me that firmware update is current, no updates available of any kind.
That is definitely not normal.
Usually if WiFi experiences a massive throughput drop at a random time, sometimes it can be due to interference, but that is extremely rare for the 5GHz band which is unlikely to get heavily misbehaving devices. In those cases, you can try collecting debug logs from the router to see if it reports any issue, though it would be very rare for you, especially since I have only encountered it once many years ago and that is in an urban area in NYC. The issue was some non-WiFi but very distruptve stuff on the 2.4GHz band that caused the WiFi router to use the lowest possible rate rather than do a ton of retransmission of frames. (likely someone in the ares using something that is very not FCC compliant).
In those cases while different APs will react differently, some can behave like seen in the attcched image.
Outside of that, an AP issue lke that will impact all WiFi client devices.
If it is just one device, then where may be some weird issue impacting performance to just that one device.
If everything is having the issue, then a good troubleshooting step will be to try an older firmware. for example, if you are on firmware 1.0.4.76, then it may be worth trying firmware 1.0.4.62 https://www.netgear.com/support/download/?model=R8000
When downgrading the firmware, you must do a factory reset, and avoid restoring a backup config file. (Since the backup files are effectively NVRAM dumps, if there is corruption in any configuration value, restoring the backup file will just reintroduce the corrupt values).
If the router wants to auto update during the setup in such a case, you may need to disconnect the WAN Ethernet cable before it gets to the checking for update stage so that it will find any.
Wanted to also add that for large jumps in firmware version, it is useful to factory reset and do a fresh setup if you notice any odd behavior.
If the issue is present on a specific firmware version, then that can be reported as a bug.
