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R7000 2.4 signal and wifi speeds flaky (1.0.9.34)
Wifi became frustratingly slow again for me today. Speedtest registerd me around 15Mps rather than my normal 150+. I rebooted the router, but this did not clear the problem. I rebooted it again w/...
Final thank you to those contirbuting to my understanding.
The NG implementation of band steering, which doesn't support roaming between bands, really won't work for my home unless I disabled 5G altogether; we have some areas not covered by 5G, so every device would need to be on 2.4 to support occasional use from worst case location.
So either I invest in mesh replacement or leave smart connect off. The latter approach has been working well on 1.0.9.28 for almost a month now without any problems and without any router reboots.
I'm going to move forward with single SSID and disabled smart connect for now. It has been working well for my household since I bought the router, which is not surprising. Netflix HD streaming, for example, needs some 5Mbps, which is an easy reach for us if all 5 members of my household were sharig a single band. We occasionally host events where some 40 people are all using our wifi at the same time, but in this case none of their devices are driving high bandwidth applications, and noone has issues.
In conclusion, while my house is a candidate for mesh, the dual band r7000 is more than adequate for us provided that we levarage roaming between bands. I plan to use separate SSIDs if or when we actually run into a bandwidth challenge.
Thanks again.
Look at my post above. I put a bunch of links in it regarding SmartConnect and the load balancing that happens behind the scenes.
There is no trickery. It simply looks at the connecting adapter and takes into consideration what is connected now and balances for best overall performance. It might put slower devices on your 2.4Ghz network, but if they are dual band and you move out of the 2.4's broadcast range, it's going to move them to the 5G broadcast. I personally like to control this myself which is why I use separate SSID names for my networks. You can try it and see how it works. If you decide its not right for your, then I would go with my original suggestion. 2 networks, 2 names.
There is no trickery. It simply looks at the connecting adapter and takes into consideration what is connected now and balances for best overall performance. It might put slower devices on your 2.4Ghz network, but if they are dual band and you move out of the 2.4's broadcast range, it's going to move them to the 5G broadcast. I personally like to control this myself which is why I use separate SSID names for my networks. You can try it and see how it works. If you decide its not right for your, then I would go with my original suggestion. 2 networks, 2 names.
The links make a case for tri-band, but I'm still not getting dual-band. My devices wouldn't care which of two 5G radios are selected (if I had a tri-band router), as they would both have the same signal strength.
Given that my devices are going to attempt to pick the radio (right?), how does smart connect force them to use one of two (or three) different options?
Again, I was confused when, with SC enabled, the 5G radio disappeared from perspective of my laptop. Was this because I was experiencing a frequency dropout, or was it because SC attempts to "hide" all but one frequecy? And again, I really don't understand the capabilities of beamforming.