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Forum Discussion
CAX80 vs CBK752 for Xfinity
As title says, I’m in an unfortunate location where only Xfinity Internet is available with up to 1.2Gbps service being the highest offering. I currently run CAX30 with an EAX80 extender for our single floor 1,300 sq fr apartment. Was wondering if upgrading CAX30 to CAX80 would provide a better performance or would going the Orbi route work CBX752 (essentially a cable modem/wireless router and a satellite) would be the best performing out of the two.
If anyone has a real-life experience with either setup, please share it.
Thank you!
17 Replies
For that size of home, the CAX would work and maybe the EAX80 out at 30 feet, but thats a small size of home. CAX30 or 80 would work well alone. CBR750 would be ok as well. All these units though will not get over 900Mpbs since they are not supported on that ISP for 1.2Gb. CAX30 and CBR750 only have up to 1Gb support. The CAX80 does have a multi gig port however has not been certified for anything past 1Gb as of yet. No idea if or when that will happen. Something the ISP only knows.
Thanks Furry! I guess the question is which one will work better in my setup:
- apartment is is the living room and three bedrooms daisy-chained one after the other;
- coax is coming into the bedroom farthest from the living room and that’s where the CAX30 resides;
- EAX80 extended lives in the living room and serves all the devises there (TV, appleTV, two laptops when we work from home;
Would Orbi do better going through two bedrooms to get to its satellite?
Would probably be same conditions between what Orbi does and what the CAX and EAX do. Though Orbi had a dedicated wireless backhaul between the router unit and satellite where the CAX and EAX don't.
Is the current CAX and EAX working for your needs?
What speeds are you paying for?
What speeds do you get in the living room where you sit?
Is it only on the one video streaming? Meaning live streaming? Does things like Netflix buffer?
Reason I ask, is extenders increase latency and that can cause issues with live streaming like video calls.
I believe my Xfinity plan is for 1gbps service, but the real-world speed is always less than the advertised one.
No issues with other devices in the same room - i have an AppleTV that (i assume) connected to the same extender and there are no issues with streaming.
the only time we get problems with video quality is when both of our work laptops are on wireless, connected to the extender and are on video calls like Zoom.So you don't have issues if one laptop is connected to the CAX and one to the EAX?
Problem with single/dual band extenders is that they decrease throughput and increase latency. This happens because they have to use the same wireless chip to go router-----extender and then extender----devices. And they can't do both at once. So if you're having 2 devices do this, it could be enough latency to cause issues. I"d try moving the CAX to closer to the living room and getting rid of the extender.
Other devices like streaming won't have the same issue because they can buffer ahead. Live streaming like video calls can't do this. They're more sensitive to latency.
One other thing to check is the EAX80, for its full "up to 4800mbps" specs, has to use the dfs channels. In areas with radar, it can cause drops when in that mode. I usually tell people to set it down to "up to 2400mbps" and use a non-dfs channel if they're in one of those areas. It shouldn't really impact most devices as it just narrows the bandwidth from 160hz to 80hz. Which is still enough for anything people are going to throw at it.
