Nighthawk X6 R8000 Slow Wired/Wireless Speeds

Hello everyone,

So I recently discovered that my R8000 has become an extreme bottleneck bandwidth-wise in my home. It has been like this ever since I bought it (about 10 months ago). My wireless speeds are not as stellar as they should be for a device of this class (around 220mbps on my iPhone XR using 5Ghz band), but what is really killing me is the wired performance.

I use AT&T 1Gbps Fiber and the BGW210-700 that is provided by AT&T to me. Due to the poor location of my ONT (in a closet in the far corner of my dwelling), I purchased this R8000 to act as the wired/wireless hub in the dwelling from a more central location for wireless's sake.

I did a lot of troubleshooting to confirm the R8000 is without a doubt the cause of the poor bandwidth. Since I have 3 additional ports on my BGW210-700, I connected these to my 2 other bedrooms, living room, and office (which have CAT6A routed in the walls). The office connection has the R8000 on the other end, since it is the most central space I have.

So, basic wired speed test (from ANY test on the front page of google search, Speedtest.net etc) was 260-300Mbps at the absolute most with my PC hardwired to the R8000 (so path is ONT > BGW210-700 > R8000 > My PC). So the BGW210-700 has a "built in" speed test to AT&T, and this reads 917Mbps! So now I know it is 100% something in the apartment causing it.

Just to see if it was device throttling, I ran a speed test on my phone, and my computer as the same time, and the bandwidth is split 50% between them, so it is either the connection to the R8000, or the R8000 itself causing them problem.

I then used my gaming laptop using only the wired connections in the 2 bedrooms, and living room (which are directly connected to the BGW-210-700), and I see 890Mbps. So now I need to rule out the cable in the wall from the BGW210-700 to the R8000. I patched a CAT6 cable from the office port (connected to BGW210-700) directly to my computer (bypassing R8000 completely), and I started seeing 890Mbps.

So this is how i ended up here in the first place. I started going through the forums, and it looks like a major firmware change around 1.0.0.100_1.0.46 caused a lot of speed problems for a lot of other people. Some suggested that rolling back to 1.0.0.100_1.0.28 would correct this. Since the version numbers are garbage and hard to follow, and there is no clear evidence supporting it that I have found yet, I am relucatant to do this given this firmware is over 2 years old.

I did decide to start turning settings off on my R8000 to see if any of them made a measurable change, and there were two:

QoS Off (user defined internet bandwidth of 1000/1000) (made a 50-75Mbps improvement)

MAC Access Control Off (Made a 400Mbps improvement)

Turning these settings on and off turns the problem on and off like a light switch.

I still feel like I am short on around 50-100Mbps given the performance I can see out of the BGW210-700 ports, but these changes are pretty significant enough for me to call this a victory without intervention from Netgear. I am also running the latest firmware as of 10/10/21, which is 1.0.4.76_10.1.82.