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Forum Discussion
EAX80 wired access point slow speeds (to RAX120)
I bought the EAX80 put in a corner of the house with poor signal. While this sounds like a horrible place to put an extender, it then gives me full coverage outside on our patio and in our garage. So as far as signakl strength goes it is working exactly as I had hoped.
Unfortunately, I am not getting anywhere near the download speeds that I expected. I have a gigabit internet and the RAX120 uses LAG giving me 1200 mbps down and 40 mbps up. While I know that I would be limited to 1 gigabit max on a single cat5e connection to the EAX80, I am only getting 350 down and 40 up. This speed tests the same whether through the nighthawk app, speedtests using my laptop wired, or speedtests using my laptiop wirelessly. Anyone know why this would be? If I speedtest through the ethernet jack (i.e. connected straight to the RAX120) I get speeds of 950 down and 40 up.
Any ideas? If I can't get this to achieve better speeds it is getting returned unfortunately.
6 Replies
Is the EAX80 hardwired in?
Or is it running in extender mode?
reason I ask is that extenders by their very nature, drop the speed 50%. Reason why is they have to send and recieve using the same chips and so it drops the speed in half. Triband extenders don't drop the speed as much since they have a dedicated chip just for router---extender communication.
Plus if you're running the eax80 in extender mode, it has to rely on the wireless. So if you have the extender a ways away from where the router is (corner of the house) it already isnt' going to have the best signal off the router. the speed hit it takes is based off the signal its getting. So if you have it far enough away from the router that its only able to pull 700mbps then its only outputting 350mbps.
this is what your going to run into with any dual band extender. Like I said, the tribands don't take *as much* of a speed hit but I don't know of any triband wireless AX extenders yet.
Not sure what you're doing on the patio/garage that needs more than 350mbps. Most 4k video streams only need 20-40mbps connections. and gaming is less than that. its really only beneficial for large file downloads/backups.
It is hard wired into a cat5e ethernet port running in access point mode. I did not expect to see such a hit in bandwidth (about 25% of total speed from the router) using a wired backend. You are correct that the patio/garage does not need that much but it is also serving a shadowed portion of the main house.
I need as much bandwidth as I can get given that I live in a house of 6 all streaming video and gaming at the same time. Yes, we are bandwidth hogs. Because of the cabling I can't swap the position of the extender and the router or that would be my solution.
In addition, I am not liking the "stickiness" of the access point. I can be next to the router and it hangs on to the access point even though it has a clearly poorer signal (less than -70 db). I think I might be forced to run this thing in extender mode and see how it works out. It will be interesting to see how bad of a speed hit I would take.
Hardwired it shouldn't take that much of a hit.
A couple things to test.
1. hook directly up to the ethernet running to the EAX80 and speed test it.
2. then directly hardwire into the eax80 and speedtest it.
3. Try different testing sites. Many struggle with saturating gigabit. Even speedtest.com can sometimes pick a slow server.
4. Also, if you haven't, try a factory reset. its a new device and firmware changes can sometimes be helped with a factory reset afterwards.
In terms of the stickiness, its only a mesh extender when running in extender mode. In access point mode, it doesn't act as mesh.
