I'm getting really bad performance from my home wireless network. It's usable, but annoying. I've got a Netgear WNDR3700v2 router and a Netgear WN2500RP extender. The extender is connected to the router using Netgear's "Fastlane technology", where the extender talks to the router only at 5 Ghz and the extender talks to its client devices only at 2.4 Ghz.

The wifi network seems fast enough. The problem is dropped connections with client devices whether talking to the router via 2.4 Ghz or 5 Ghz or talking to the extender at 2.4 Ghz. The problems getting client devices to talk to the router at 5 Ghz are particularly bad. I have no idea if the connection between the router and extender at 5 Ghz is dropping a lot or not.

Some things I'm looking at:

1.) The router's web pages say it is set to communicate in the 2.4 Ghz band on channel 2 and at a mode that's up to 130 Mbps. I assume that mode thing means it's communicating at 20 MHz?

The extender's web pages say it's set up to communicate in the 2.4 Ghz band on channel 1 and at a mode that's up to 300 Mbps.

Both of these channels are chosen automatically be the respective devices. I have not gone in and said "only use this channel".

Could the extender and the router be interfering with each other? Or, does the Wifi protocol's built-in collision detection prevent that from happening? My (vague) understanding is that the Wifi protocols have some kind of collision detection specified (think the acronym is CSMA/CD) that makes it so that each device on a wireless network is only communicating once at a time.

So, should the extender be like on channel 1 and the router on channel 6 for the 2.4 Ghz band? does it matter that one of them is set up for communicating at up to 300 Mbps and the other is set up to communicate at up to 130 Mbps?

2.) As I said above, the router and the extender only talk directly to each other in the 5 Ghz band. Both the router and the extender are set up to communicate at up to 300 Mbps on channel 44(P)+48(S). That sounds right to me.

3.) I am using a VOIP device for home phone service. So, the router does have the VOIP device wired into it. And wired into the VOIP device is one of those expandable cordless phone systems. The kind that has one base and you can have to 6 cordless satellites. We do have 6 satellites, but rarely use them. Home phone service over them is really good. And the cordless phones all communicate with the base using DECT 6.0 technology, so my understanding is that this shouldn't interfere with our Wifi network?

Forum Discussion

Troubleshooting interferences, looking at channels