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Nighthawk X8 R8500 Band Steering
Hello everyone. I'm looking to buy this amazing router as it gets available in Spain, so I have read every review available, and I found one thing that could be very frustrating. There's no o...
At this time, the router only support band steering on 5GHz band with smart connect enabled. No 2.4/5G band steering support.
FWIW, Netgear is adding Smart Connect to the R7000. See here. That suggests that the limitation in R8500 is only in firmware and there is hope that they will add support for all three bands in the future.
I have a R7000, so I will probably try out Smart Connect. But I hope it is truly smart. I want to drop down from 5 GHz to 2.4 GHz only if the throughput improves. My smartphone has a tendency to prefer the band with the higher signal strength, which will almost always be the slower 2.4 GHz band, even when the 5 GHz band is perfectly usable. I ended up locking my smartphone to 5 GHz because I got tired of manually switching. There are a few dead spots in my house, but the sacrifice was worth it.
Thank you for your answer.
I think so also, it should be firmware problem, but as the MU-MIMO is anounced for 2016 on this router and is not a deal breaker, rebuild all the Wi-Fi wich a big amount of devices to get different SSIDs for 2,4Ghz and 5Ghz is a nightmare.
So maybe there's a workaround to set the same SSID but with no Band Steering for the moment. This should be OK.
Regards.
Does anybody know if this is possible in the actual BETA?
I'm just waiting to buy this router becouse I want to have the same SSID on the 2,4Ghz and 5Ghz.
Thank you!
At this time, the router only support band steering on 5GHz band with smart connect enabled. No 2.4/5G band steering support.