NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Firmware updated EX8000 keeps dropping Internet
Hi all,
I have read about multiple issued relating to the R8000 but I seem to be experiencing a similar issue with your EX8000 mesh range extender.I regularly experience an issue (perhaps once an hour) where I lose interernet connection for about 10 - 30 seconds. My connection to the Wifi is always connected it seems to drop the connection between extended and router.
Other details
- I have an Arrius Surfboard router as my cable modem and bought the extender to improve the range upstairs in my house.
- I have manually setup the extender to connect to both 2.4 and 5Ghz bands in a mesh configuration.
- Security is WPA-PSK [AE].
- I have good signal from router to extender and a very strong signal to my devices i.e laptop, android phones/tablets and other such devices. (I have to admit the power of this device is fantastic.)
- I have made sure there are no IP conflicts (DHCP for devices and static and differet addressed for mesh and router).
- Firmward is 1.0.0.126.
- I do not experience any issues of dropping if I use just the router (without the extender)
I hope someone has a fix, otherwise I will have to return to Amazon as faulty.
Cheers,
Adrian
134 Replies
I had the same issues as everyone here with lost internet connection and DNS not working. For some reason the internal LAN remains connected.
I tried different FW new and old but they all had same issue with my extenders and Comcast 1Gb gateway.
Tried different channels with and without DFS ... still same issue.
Just a suggestion for the rest of you that are out of warranty ...
I now have timers connected to my extenders to power off at 3am and power on at 3:01am. It's the only thing that works without impacting the family.
It's really sad that these otherwise great devices have these issues (as they are NOT cheap!).
Good luck and I think I'll go back to Linksys next time.
Some have reported that recent FW is not working right on the 8000. Others reported that revertting back to last working version helps. You don't always have to update FW. I have a friend who uses a EX8000. Zero issues. I'll see what version he has loaded.
- Yeah, right, no issue. That's a bunch of baloney. They all have similar problems even across different manufacturers. Just buy a simple extender like the one I recommended above. It works great and fairly cheap.
Maybe some issues in FW on the EX, however other problems may be else where that make it seems like the EX maybe at fault when its not.
EX does work. There are some factors that have to be looked at to really figure out where the problem is. My EX7700 is working well for me. So is my friends EX8000. However his is connected to a NG XR500. His EX8000 is loaded with v186. Zero problems.
I really wish I would have read this thread before buying these Netgear products because I'm having the same issue of dropped connections and I've only had my Netgear router, modem, and extender for less than a month, smh. It looks like I'm going to have to send back the extender because that seems to be the main culprit, according to this thread.
joker7380 wrote:
I really wish I would have read this thread before buying these Netgear products because I'm having the same issue of dropped connections and I've only had my Netgear router, modem, and extender for less than a month, smh. It looks like I'm going to have to send back the extender because that seems to be the main culprit, according to this thread.
I replaced this horrible netgear Mesh with a Linksys RE9000 and has been running for several months with ZERO issues.
Check out this review
What Firmware version is loaded on the EX?
What is the Mfr and model# of the main host router the NG extender is connected too?What is the size of your home? Sq Ft?
What is the distance between the router and extender(s)? 30 feet is recommended in between them to begin with depending upon building materials when wirelessly connected.What channels are you using on the main host router?
joker7380 wrote:
I really wish I would have read this thread before buying these Netgear products because I'm having the same issue of dropped connections and I've only had my Netgear router, modem, and extender for less than a month, smh. It looks like I'm going to have to send back the extender because that seems to be the main culprit, according to this thread.
Run as fast as you can from this product. Tried two of them, all the same problems as listed above. Spent over 4 hours on the phone with support on 4 different phone calls. Support is obviously not in America and the techs are hard to understand at best. Becasue I have limited cell signal my phone connects via WiFi calling. I explained this to the tech and let them know that when the router or externder was rebooted, they could not call right back as I would not get the calll. 3 different times this happened and 3 times they called back immediately only to leave a message and force me to play the on-hold game again (never less than 30 minutes). One tech had the gall to tell me to just call back and I would get right in. Yeah, right! On the final call, I explained the situation and asked to be elevated. The tech kept probing. Again asked to be escalated. Finally put me on hold for 5 minutes only to come back and say no manager was available to escalate to. At this point I hung up, returned the product to Best Buy and will try some other product. Too bad because the router is nice and seems to work well.
Hello Lurch1971,
I'd like to assist with support following up on your case. When you get a chance, please send me a message with your email address and case number.
Thanks,Christian
Netgear, you suck!
This “internet dropping” problem is listed like forever and you are doing NOTHING to resolve this.
I’m so disappointed that you are selling premium priced equipment with crap software.
I have to restart my Extender daily, in order to use it. If not, is says that I’m connected to it, but with no internet.
The DFS WiFi is a joke also... tried to manually change the channel, is says applying, it restarts itself and afterwards it is on the same channel.
I don’t have the option to select a non-DFS network. Common.... it’s 2019.... you cannot sell this donuts anymore...
Mine is still poor! Keeps dropping teh link to teh routre and not only that the throughput is not what is expected. I am now resigned togetting TP LINK powerline kit for the study and placing teh EX8000 in the round file.
Extremely disapointed and now £100 down
Hello Attractive & MightyAtom - Would you mind providing me with the firmware version the extender is currently on.
Thanks,
Christian
- Additional information on EX8000.
Internal clock is always wrong. Regardless of Automatic Time Server adjustment or Manual Sync Adjustment it seems to be very slow in time keeping. Hi All
Just sharing my expeerience on this issue. I've been having this problem too myself
Main Router: Asus RT-AC88U
Extender : EX8000
NetGear EX8000 Firmware - latest as of today's posting.
To further debug the case, i purposely set the extender's wifi SID to be different then main router's SID
MainRouter's 2.4Ghz - no issues
MainRouter's 5.0Ghz- no issues
Extender's 2.4Ghz - no issues
Extender's 5.0Ghz - constant disconnects.
i use IPTools to ping a site (172.217.31.36) constantly for every second.
- When there's an internet drop - i'll get up to 10 pings (10 seconds of drop)
though single second drops (1 ping drops) happens sometimes even for the 2.4ghz or MainRouter's 5.0Ghz, but it's no where as bad as consecutively 10-20 ping drops.
After fiddling around many things, finally i decided to disable MainRouter's 5.0Ghz to test, for some reason now my Extender's 5.0Ghz is much much more stable.
i still get the occassional 1 ping drop, or maybe up to 3 ping drop, but no more 10 ping drops. It's much more bareable now.
So far tested only for an hour, but hopefully things turn out good for the rest of the day.
- Hi all update.
In the end. No matter what I tried to use the ex8000 as AP. It won't work.
In the end the only thing that works was changing it to be WiFi repeater instead of AP. That worked with no more signal drops.
ILatest update.
Signal started dropping again, few things i realized
1. DNS for my extender - i set it to 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8 seems to be dropping often.
2. My client decide (Samsung phones have no problem after step#1 is changed, however, huawei devices still have signal drops)
I have RMA-d my device on the off chance it was a fault in the hardware.
The "new" device I received is exhibiting the same issue, it appears this device is also on a much older firmware so I'm no longer sure this is even related to new firmware.
I'm glad I have an old extender from another seemingly more reliable brand lying around that works flawlessly, but its' much slower.
As for the netgear ex8000, it's now an expensive paperweight for which I will try and get a refund. even on just the 2.4 bands it drops every now and then, though much less than 5g bands. I can clearly see from the status page the netgear device is dropping the connection between itself and the router at random, actually connecting to the netgear device over wifi/cable works fine. (and i've tested the routers 5g with other devices)
I really do not know what to say, other than mine has long gone to the round file and is now probably in bits being sold for any scrap value!
Truly a poor piece of WiFi equipment. Netgear really did drop the ball on this one.
I REALLY wish I would have read these post BEFORE purchasing this device. I just installed it this week. Updated to latest firmware and I have the exact same issues as posted on the previous 5 pages.... This is such a frustration. Not to mention the hassle it was to install. I use access control which I had to disable until all the duplicate IP/Hostname's were created with new MAC IDs. Then my IP reservations blew up in my router because again, same IPs but new MACs, which caused IP conflicts. After I sorted that I thought I was good. Nope, now the dreaded Internet drop. Both bands, multiple devices, random times, no internet... Ugh. Sounds like I should return to Best Buy and get something else. Or has there finally been a fix?
Very frustrated with this device. I'm having the same issue as everyone else where I have to restart it about once a day in order to reconnect to the internet.
This was way too expensive for such poor quality. Going to return it and buy something else
- I uninstalled the Netgear Genie from my computer and my dropped signal problem went away.
After struggling with this mesh extender for over a week I decided to pull out all the stops and try to figure out why internet kept dropping but my devices would say they were connected and appeared perfectly fine.
In short: The virtual MAC addresses the extender assigns are likely causing conflicts with your router's ARP table.
I decided to install pfSense on a micro-pc and use my RAX75 as an AP. The EX8000 acts as an extender for this AP. I noticed, like others have mentioned, that the wired connections work perfectly fine when the extender has WiFi connectivity issues. I also noticed that as soon as I unplug the extender my WiFi is fixed. I tried rolling back several firmware versions and I couldn't find a single one where this worked "properly". This alone really narrows it down.
I then did some digging around how the extender actually works, and its documented by Netgear that this extender (as well as many of their others) create virtual MAC addresses for the devices that are connected to it. So then what happens when I have an IP assigned to one device then the MAC address changes because I roamed to and from the extenders range? Answer: It chokes - Unless something tells the router that the device at that IP address is now at a different MAC address. Or rather
This extender apparently does a horrible job at letting the router / AP know when it links the virtual MAC address to the IP the device was using. My fix is crude, but so far seems to work. In pfSense I created a tunable for "net.link.ether.inet.max_age" to set the value to about a minute. This basically means the entries in the ARP table (IP address <---> MAC address) expire after a minute. This sort of feature will vary by router, any many may not allow any sort of control over this. I suspect the "14 minutes" referred to earlier in this post may actually be a common ARP table entry expiration value.
I may not be 100% correct in my assessment since I am not a networking guru, but I do know that as soon as I deleted the ARP table cached entry for my phone's real MAC address, the internet worked again. And so far my shortended cache seems to have fixed the issue across all devices (so far, knock on wood)
