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Forum Discussion
Internet speed degrades after adding a third EX6100
I have a Huawei B593 4G LTE 2.4GHz 802.11n router at home. I live in a fairly large house so I went ahead and bought two EX6100s, and placed them around the house, and things worked fine. I conducted multiple internet speed tests, and the speed was pretty much the same when connected to the main router vs. either of the two EX6100s.
I still had a few dead spots at home so I bought a third EX6100 and configured it to work with the same router. As soon as I did that, the internet speed went severely down whenever I tired connecting to one of the three EX6100s. At any given time, 2 of them would be working fine with a normal internet speed, while the third would have a severely slow internet connection. The problem does not seem to affect one EX6100 in particular; it affects, at random, one of the 3 at a time, while the other two would continue to deliver normal connection speeds.
I do realize that I'm not making use of the 802.11ac or 5GHz features of any of the extenders since my router doesn't support either one, but that didn't seem to affect the performance until I added the third one.
What am I doing wrong? Is it that the router cannot handle 3 extenders at the same time (the router's manual says it can handle 32 simultaneously connected devices)? Would it help to upgrade to an 802.11ac 5GHz 4G LTE router? Ir is there something in the EX6100 configurations that I need to do?
Thank you,
AJ
I still had a few dead spots at home so I bought a third EX6100 and configured it to work with the same router. As soon as I did that, the internet speed went severely down whenever I tired connecting to one of the three EX6100s. At any given time, 2 of them would be working fine with a normal internet speed, while the third would have a severely slow internet connection. The problem does not seem to affect one EX6100 in particular; it affects, at random, one of the 3 at a time, while the other two would continue to deliver normal connection speeds.
I do realize that I'm not making use of the 802.11ac or 5GHz features of any of the extenders since my router doesn't support either one, but that didn't seem to affect the performance until I added the third one.
What am I doing wrong? Is it that the router cannot handle 3 extenders at the same time (the router's manual says it can handle 32 simultaneously connected devices)? Would it help to upgrade to an 802.11ac 5GHz 4G LTE router? Ir is there something in the EX6100 configurations that I need to do?
Thank you,
AJ
4 Replies
- Just my opinion, but, what you're attempting to do is perhaps the worst approach to expanding WiFi coverage - by using wireless repeaters, which, by design, must re-transmit on the same channel, you're creating an environment where there are multiple access points in close proximity, all on the same channel and all of the repeaters will attempt to re-transmit simultaneously - at some point they will start to interfere with one another. The normal recommendation is to have the devices on different channels, selecting from 1, 6 & 11, so that no two adjacent devices are on the same channel.
- Fordem, Thank you for responding. The problem though is that I cannot select the channel on each of the extenders. Like you said, each extender retransmits through the same 2.4GHz channel as the router, and therefore, the option to select a different channel for each of the extenders is not available. Is there another solution to this problem? Would getting a 5GHz router solve this? Thanks!
- I believe the EX6100 can be configured as an access point - wire it back to the main router and configure them on non overlapping channels - that should prevent them from interfering with one another
fordem wrote: I believe the EX6100 can be configured as an access point - wire it back to the main router and configure them on non overlapping channels - that should prevent them from interfering with one another
Wiring back to main router would be ideal because you don't have to share half the bandwidth repeating data to the main router over the wireless channel. But I suspect you went to a wireless extender because hardwiring is not possible.
Looking at the EX6100 manual, I didn't see a way to change channels on your EX6100 extender. (which I can do on my
R6250 router)
The internet address for the EX6100 manual:
http://www.manualslib.com/manual/703750/Netgear-Ex6100.html?page=25#manual
On page 25, the manual does tell how to change mode:
"Enable 20/40 MHz Coexistence (2.4 GHz). The extender 2.4 GHz WiFi network can run in either 40 MHz mode or 20 MHz mode. When this check box is selected, the extender uses 40 MHz mode unless a nearby WiFi network is using 40 MHz mode. If that happens, the extender uses 20 MHz mode to coexist with that network."
Try this on each extender to see if it helps.
