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Nighthawk AC2300 - R7000P - Extremely slow speeds on an iPhone X
Hi,
I setup a new R7000P router, and I seem to be having a significant problem with the connection/speed on my iPhone X. As seen in the attached screenshot phone_link_rate_marked.PNG from the Nighthawk app it shows a Link Rate of only 6 Mbps. In the same app when I check my HP Windows laptop I'm getting a Link Rate of 585 Mbps (I have a screenshot of this too, but only one image is allowed in this post). With the same Nighthawk app when I measure the network speed it says I have 117.7 Mbps down and 6.0 Mbps up (again can't share the screenshot). I also measured the speed with SpeedOf.Me on both the phone and laptop, and I get 130 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up on the laptop; however, on my phone I only get 1.63 Mbps down and 0.17 Mbps up. I ran both tests with the all other devices off on the network (i.e. the laptop was turned off when I measured the speed with my phone).
The speed on my phone is so bad that the connection itself goes off and on, and I am not able to transfer files wireless between my phone and my laptop which I was able to do with an old ASUS router over a week ago. I have never had this connection problem with my iPhone on any other WiFi network (my old home network, work, public, ...).
This has been going on for a week now since I setup this new router last weekend. I have reset the router and modem a number of times now.
Here is all the other information of importance:
Firmware - V1.3.1.64_10.1.36
Dynamic QoS disabled
Modem model - Netgear CM700
ISP - Comcast
It looks like other users have reported slow speeds with iPhones too:
Nighthawk R7000P speeds extremely slow
Mobile devices slow on Nighthawk R7900
I have also expereneced this issue at least once this past week, but I'm not sure if this is related:
R7000P - Every day WiFi gets unstable and slow, after restart back to normal until the next day
I'm looking forward to getting this issue resolved, so let me know what steps I should take next.
Thank you
Great news! Everything is now working at top speed for both my iPhone and my laptop with Smart Connect enabled.
After resetting the router 5-10 times and switching on/off Smart Connect 3 times over a period of a month, it seems like the router has learned to maximize bandwidth for both my computer and phone.
Based on these other posts with similar smart phone issues: Nighthawk R7000P speeds extremely slow and Mobile devices slow on Nighthawk R7900 which seemed to eventually be resolved later, I'm thinking there is probably some bug with the router upon initial installation in relation to smart phone bandwidth, but after things are reset and switched around enough it gets into a normal state.
Either way it is fixed now, so I'm happy!
9 Replies
Are you using smart connect?
Because it shows you connected to the 2.4ghz band. Its more sensitive to interference. have you been able to connect the iphone to the 5ghz band?
Thanks for the reply plemans.
That's a good question. Indeed I am using Smart Connect and my HP laptop was automatically connected to 5GHz while the iPhone was connected to 2.4GHz. I figured this wasn't the issue since I assumed the way Smart Connect should work it should automatically flip to the faster frequency band, correct?
I went ahead and disabled Smart Connect and manually connected the phone to the 5GHz network, and indeed now I get the top speed.
However, this doesn't seem to be the whole story since I also manually connected my HP laptop to the 2.4GHz network with Smart Connect disabled and while I didn't get the top speed it still clocked in at 25.47 Mbps down (20% of top) and 6.56 Mbps up (full speed) which is still an order of magnitude faster than what I am getting on my phone on 2.4GHz. Maybe this is just explained by a weaker wireless network card in the phone vs the laptop?
Long story short, with Smart Connect enabled why would the iPhone not automatically switch to the 5GHz network if this frequency band has less interference?
Thanks
So the auto switching isn't right away. It might switch right when it notices the demand but from my experience its more based on user history. My devices I constantly stream on, it learns to place on the 5ghz. my lower bandwidth devices will stay on 2.4ghz until they've been repeatedly using a lot of bandwidth. It makes sense if you think about it. When a device requests data from the router, it sends the most it can handle. If it had to take into account this fact, every device would be getting put on the 5ghz because it'd be maxing out the signal right away. so it has to figure out a rough average of how much data a device uses and not peak data useage.
have you tried changing 2.4ghz channels on the router to see if it'd help the phone?
Great news! Everything is now working at top speed for both my iPhone and my laptop with Smart Connect enabled.
After resetting the router 5-10 times and switching on/off Smart Connect 3 times over a period of a month, it seems like the router has learned to maximize bandwidth for both my computer and phone.
Based on these other posts with similar smart phone issues: Nighthawk R7000P speeds extremely slow and Mobile devices slow on Nighthawk R7900 which seemed to eventually be resolved later, I'm thinking there is probably some bug with the router upon initial installation in relation to smart phone bandwidth, but after things are reset and switched around enough it gets into a normal state.
Either way it is fixed now, so I'm happy!
