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Forum Discussion
Poor WiFi reception and speed with with new routers
Hi, All--
I have had this WNDR4500v3 router for several years, and it has great reception from nearly anywhere on my property, but of course, it is limited to "N" speeds . . .
A couple of years ago, I purchased a Cisco RV340W Dual-WAN router, so I could have redundancy with multiple ISP providers, since I work from home. This router has 4 antennas, and the Netgear has none . . . the WiFi reception performance couldn't come close to matching the Netgear, so I set the Netgear up as an Access Point and disabled the WiFi radios on the Cisco. That worked fine for the last couple of years.
Fast forward to last month--I decided it was time to upgrade to the latest 802.11ax spec router, to improve my wirelss speed, and started researching . . . there were online reviews of the TP-Link models with 802.11ax, so I ended up buying one of those . . . it also had 4 antennas, where again, my Netgear had none . . . I set it up as an Access Point just like the Netgear, and any way you sliced it, the reception compared to the Netgear was poor--sometimes even in the same room with the router!!
I tried an ASUS AX router (which also has antennas--2 to be exact) as an Access Point, but it also had poor WiFi reception compared to the N900, so I returned those and kept the TP-Link routers, thinking that maybe I might be able to somehow tweak them to receive better performance.
One day, the 2.4Ghz band that my Smart devices stopped working, so I decided to try to find a good deal on another router, and found the Netgear Nighthawk RAX35-nas for a great price and bought it. My thoughts were--it's a Netgear--it has to have good WiFi reception!
Well, after having this Netgear now for 4 days, and playing around with the settings, including disabling the AX specs, I STILL have poor WiFi reception!! WT ACTUAL F?!?!?!?
Why did I have such great reception wtih a WiFi router that had no antennas, and have such POOR reception with any modern router that has antennas?!?!?!? For the record, that's THREE routers I've tried now, all from different manufacturers, and NONE of them match the reception of my several-years-old Netgear N900/WNDR4500v3 router!!
What do I have to do to get at least comparable reception?!?!?!? Is there some AX (or hell, even an AC) router out there that can match my N900?!?!?
7 Replies
Oh, and before anybody asks, ALL of the routers involved had the latest firmware installed--ALL of them!!
How are you measuring wifi reception?
Did you do an actual speedtest?
The limits on broadcast power was set prior to the WNDR that you had. And routers were maxing that out before the WNDR.
The difference comes down to actual throughput. The newer AC and AX devices might say they have lower connection strength but still have significant faster throughput speeds because they are more efficient and have higher thoroughput.
How do I measure? How about remaining connected to the router?
When I sit in the same room as the router, and it can't maintain a connection, througput speeds are meaningless if it DROPS the connection!!
