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Forum Discussion
Nighthawk A7000 Adapter Unstable Connection
This only just recently started happening so I'd assume it would be fixable, but no one has an answer for it. Just recently, my WiFi USB Adapter has been unable to keep a strong connection to my wifi. On my games, speedtest.net, and more, it visibly shows an instant drop in my download speed every 20 seconds (I counted). This is unbearable and I would very much appreciate a solution. (p.s. I know its the adapter because no other devices in the house share this problem)
2 Replies
RichieIsHuman wrote:
(p.s. I know its the adapter because no other devices in the house share this problem)
I would not jump to that conclusion. It could be your operating system (Windows?) or your router.
Wifi is a two-way process. The adapter talks to the router. Windows sits in between them.
Have you looked for local wifi interference?
Have you tried different wifi channels?
Is this on 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz.
It definitely seems to be adapter software issue. Had similar issues with this one, among many others, as explained already in different thread. Funniest one was getting BSODs with this adapter, kernel crash dumps are showing that A7000 driver went into recursion and exhausted the stack (but what else could you expect with kernel driver from stone age considering how many updates Win10 had in past years). Trick with disabling USB2/3 switching helps with crashes and connection drops, but stability is quite bad anyway (no crashes then but average bandwidth is only 30-40% of peak of 300Mbps). Even though peak peformance is sometimes up to 10-20% higher than USB2-based adapters from years ago, it have much worse stability than these. Could show you the graph comparing connection speed and stability on 4 different USB adapters and one PCIe, all having antennas in exactly the same place, using exactly the same router and PC, with simultaenous stability checks on other machines to double-check for router issues, showing that there is definitely something wrong with A7000 (but I'm not saying its Netgear issue only, got similar issues with one ASUS and newest TP-Link, I think they all use the same or similar chipset and all share the same old kernel driver issues - keep in mind that I have latest Win10, so this might be an issue) but you probably wouldn't care anyway. Long story short is that best results I get from using quite old USB2 adapters (stable 240Mbps) and PCIe ones (full stable bandwidth). PCIe I could easily understand, but why old USB2 adapters with 1cm internal antennas are better? Hard to tell why, sometimes new technology isn't the best ;-) Cheers.
