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Forum Discussion
EX7700 - can I pair my existing with a new router?
Hello, I already own an EX7700 range extender which does not pair well with my Xfinity Gateway. Can I purchase an XR500 or XR 700 and pair them for a mesh network? Or does the pairing have to happe...
Before we move on to the other parts, what issues are you having with it paired to your gateway?
What gateway is it?
What firmware is on the extender?
did you pair via wps or usingg the installation wizard?
plemans Thank you for your response!
I am a networking noob.
The issue I am having is that I have great wifi reception in the garage and other areas covered exclusively by the extender, but back in the house closer to the router/gateway I have frequent problems with huge lag or ping problems? IDK what to call it but i'll initiate something and get pinwheelling and then a no connection msg. This happens approximately one in 8 or 10 actions and is most frequent in the area equidistant between the router and extender. Tons of dropped video conferencing upstairs from the router. My comcast speed test in the house is regularly between 223-300 MBS. pings around 13ms. In the garage ~150mbs, ping 14ms I figured there was a problem with my devices shifting between the gateway and the extender as this doesn't happen when the extender is off (but then I can't get wifi reception in the garage for gaming).
The gateway is from Xfinity -- ARRIS TG1682GIDK how to find the firmware on the extender. I paired them using the WPS and don't know about the installation wizard.
You can try cheating if you wanted.
You can log into the extender and set it up with its own SSID instead of using the same ssid. That way the devices in the garage could be set to connect to the extender and the devices in the house could connect to the gateway.
If you really wanted to, you could add a better router and put the arris in modem only mode. so it'd go:
arris modem---->router------>extender
not saying it'd work a lot better.
Reason why is the mesh extenders function off a roaming protocol. They don't move devices between router-----extender, the devices themselves move between them based on whatever roaming spec they have built into them. Older devices tend not to roam as well.
The full mesh systems like orbi work better than the mesh extenders because they're designed for it while the extenders are more designed to work with any router.