Forum Discussion

NETGEAR Employee Retired

Jun 22, 2018

Create a WiFi Mesh System with the NEW Nighthawk EX7700 Mesh Extender

Experience super-fast WiFi mesh with the latest member of our Nighthawk Mesh Extender family! The new EX7700 allows you to create powerful whole home WiFi using your existing WiFi. Wit...

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Jun 25, 2018

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TigerTiger

Tutor

Jun 30, 2018

So, I am totally skeptical. I have been working my way up the extender food chain adding thgem to my wifi: EX7300...to EX 7500..."Mesh enabling pgrade of the EX7300"...now there's an EX7700 available. I'm skeptical of any improvement with it!

The diagram in the ad shows "whole house" coverage, but the wifi router is off to the one end of the house and covers the far side and upstairs. I don't know how many people have their router on one end of the house and from what I'm reading from the community, many routers are centrally located where cable and cable modem enter the home, like my set up. So, the solution seems to be 2 extenders.

I have an EX7500 at one side of the house, good signal, and the "Mesh upgraded" EX7300 at the other*. I use a Google wifi analyzer and can see the signals. While of good quality, my wifi connected devices connected to the same or different frequencies (2.4, 5 or 5AC) act like they hate each other and drop their connections. I can't imagine that Mesh should work like this. Should it?

Will I and my set-up be happier investing in an EX7500 to replace the 7300 or move up to 1 or even 2 of the forthcoming EX7700's (I feel that's a sucker bet, rember I'm skeptical) or switch to Orbie and have a native Mesh system or even switch brands (that would be like giving up)? As I said I'm skeptical, though I started off really liking the R7900 router but that was many connected devices ago.

Thank you everyone.

*I returned an EX8000 as it was horrible in my setting, wouldn't even connect to my router.

wesz28
Aspirant
Dec 17, 2018
I have the main router upstairs and set up the Nighthawk Extender downstairs, where all lights, door bell, Ring, Rokus, Thermostast, laptop, iPhones are used, I have used all types of Netgear Extenders thru the years but this is the best technology, laptop runs at Ping 23; Download 277; Upload 24 mbps wired to Extender using VPN Ping29; Download 95 and Upload 24 and iPhones while connected to Nord VPN Ping 32, Download 21.3; Upload 22.2 now turning off VPN Ping 25; Download 251; Upload 23.4 and sometimes it won't connect while VPN is connected even on the "fastest server" thru the Extender. Would there be something on the "firmaware" blocking the VPN?
- StephenB
  Guru - Experienced User
  Dec 17, 2018
  The extender shouldn't be blocking the VPN traffic, as far as it is concerned it is just another encrypted stream.
  - wesz28
    Aspirant
    Dec 18, 2018
    That is what I thought, but as soon as the VPN is off it links back to Extender at full speed.
raven_au
Virtuoso
Jan 05, 2019

TigerTiger wrote:

So, I am totally skeptical. I have been working my way up the extender food chain adding thgem to my wifi: EX7300...to EX 7500..."Mesh enabling pgrade of the EX7300"...now there's an EX7700 available. I'm skeptical of any improvement with it!

*I returned an EX8000 as it was horrible in my setting, wouldn't even connect to my router.

I don't know about the EX8000 but the EX7700 firmware is fundamentally broken.

I see invalid MAC addresses corresponding to a few devices (sometimes with an additional entry with the correct virtual MAC address on my D7800, also seen on D8500 and R8500).

Together with the DHCP server on the D7800 (and at least the D8500) not honoring the address range set in the router configuration makes for a real mess.

There was once a time when Netgear firmware could be relied upon, those days have gone I'm afraid.