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Forum Discussion
EX3700 extender 5ghz won't both connect and repeat simultaneously
For some odd reason, I believed I should be able to connect the extender to the 2.4ghz and 5ghz bands in my home, and then repeat them both. It seems this is a challenge. If I connect the 2.4ghz and ...
Although my extender is a different model (3800 rather than 3700), I had exactly the same problem with 5GHz. I could never connect to the extended 5GHz signal, because it would fail to get an IP address.
I solved the problem as follows: My router had the same SSID for both bands (2.4Ghz and 5GHz.) I didn't realise that this could be an issue, but as soon as I changed the SSID of the 5GHz signal from the router (in my router's setup), the problem went away. I can now connect with no problems to either the 2.4 or 5Ghz extended signal.
Re my previous post: I realised after posting that of course by renaming the SSID of the 5GHz from the router, the extender would no longer be able to see it and would only be connected via 2.4GHz. This was confirmed when I looked at the connections using the 'mywifiext.net' status page. When I gave the extender the new 5GHz SSID for the router, I could no longer connect to the extended 5GHz signal - again it failed to get an IP address.
So all I actually succeeded in doing, was to confirm the problem as posted by the original post: it seems that if you connect extender and router via 2.4GHz only, then you can connect to both 2.4 and 5GHz extended signals, but if you connect the router and extender using both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, then it is only possible to connect to the 2.4GHz extended signal.
I'd be interested if anyone else can shed any light on this issue.
Hi, OP here. I did the same thing, tried to rename the 5ghz. All 4 of my network signals have different names. I never did fix this, and have set up one of these since with the same problem. It is a design flaw that netgear is not recognizing. Their only answer was "return it".
While the extender is not useless, it is less useful in this fashion. I wanted to extend the 5ghz, it is uneffected by cordless phones and especially microwaves. Microwave ovens operate at 2.4ghz and will kill your wifi while cooking popcorn haha. I wanted the netflix devices to work while the microwave was running, hence the 5ghz. Since I am apparently required a 2.4ghz connection either to or from the extender, because of netgear engineers being useless, this did not work for my original intention.
It does function as an extender, but only to extend your 2.4ghz network to a larger 2.4 and 5ghz band. It will not extend both from the router side apparently.
Let me know also if someone finds a fix, but I've decided to live with it. Hard to recommend products they didn't bother to test though.
I did try one my thing this afternoon, which didn't really help me but may be of general interest: I connected the extender via 5GHz only to the router. This worked in the sense that I could then connect to both the 5 and 2.4GHz extended signals. So if you want to connect to the router via either 2.4GHz or 5GHz, then it seems to work, but if you connect the router via both 2.4 and 5GHz, then only the 2.4GHz extended signal works.
Since at the location I want the extender, the 2.4GHz router signal is the strongest, in the end I've just connected to the router via 2.4GHz, which gives me usable 2.4 and 5GHz extended signals. However, I agree that this seems like a bug that Netgear should fix.