D7800 unexpected difficulties

[raven_au]

Hi all,

Due to the implending availability of the R9000 here in Australia I thought I would put my D7800 back into service to see how the Qualcomm wireless would go in my current environment.

All I can say is there were some unexpected and unusual problems and I thought describing my experience might be useful to pass on to Netgear engineering since this device is the current top of the line Netgear dsl modem router here in Australia.

I will not waste my time speaking to support.

I'll try not to go into the detail of all the tests that I did (partly becuase I didn't document them all) and just stick to what I think is worth investigation.

In my environment I have a router in the kitchen near the phone outlet and I have a two other devices setup as wireless bridges, both are fairly close to the router so have a good wireless signal and generally enjoy good throughput. I also have a number of devices, three TVs (Sony AndroidTVs), iPads, mobile phones, Nexus players, etc.

Anyway, I put the router back into service, I used several versions of the firmware during the testing and eventually ended up using the latest available, version 1.0.1.16.

Initially I found that, after trying several things, pings were not getting to the D7800 from behind the bridge on my desk at all, even though the bridge is only about 7m away from the D7800 and the status page of the bridge showed the wireless to be fine.

I eventually thought that there might be some incompatibility between Broadcomm AC2166 (of the bridges) and the Qualcomm AC1733 (of the router) so I replaced the two bridges with AC1733 devices, one a Qualcomm device and the other a Quantenna device.

This resulted in some progress in that pings from the bridge would basically stop every few minutes for between 10 to 30 seconds or more, certainly enough to cause disconnect failures.

Then I thought the D7800 might have faulty wireless so I set it up as a bridge to check and it functioned fine for the duration the test so I don't think there is a fault with the hardware.

Eventually I thought maybe the NAS connected to the D7800 was causing some sort of routing problem as I have (had) two of it's network interfaces connected to the router (and they are not bonded, one is configued to be used with virtual machines as an independent interface, so shouldn't be a problem, maybe it was not setup quite right even though the R8500 has no trouble with it at all).

So I disconnected that network interface and tried again.

The D7800 has been up and running now for about 22 hours without the intermittent wireless drop outs I had seen but I haven't load tested the wireless yet, as I had done in previous tests.

Becuase I have two NAS devices I duplicate one to the other via one of the bridges and, because they are quite close I generally get around 90 mega bytes a second throughput using AC1733 or above wireless devices. Downloading and uploading multi-gigabyte video files is my load test and that functionality is needed for the NAS to NAS duplication I use as a backup method. Anyway, I'll eventually get to carry out that test too but haven't done so yet.

The end result of spending quite a lot of time on this is that I believe there is an incompatibility between AC2166 devices and the Qualcomm AC1733 implementation in the D7800.

If I'm correct it should be straight forward for Netgear engineering to, at least, check this.

Note that I can't test this with a AC2166 Netgear device as a bridge becuase the only one I have is an R8500 and the wrireless bridge mode of that doesn't seem to work with anything that I have tried (but that is not the topic of this post, and I'm digressing).

But there is more, at no point, including now that the D7800 appears to be functioning OK, does the iOS Netgear Genie application Network Map functionality work.

When I try to use it I get only the iOS device I'm connected with, the D7800 itself and the internet icon even though there are at least 20 active devices and usually somewhat more.

I was able to enable the Parental Control via the iOS Genie app and this, and the Network Map functionality, are the only things I have tested in the app.

So that's my report, I hope this information will at least be passed on to engineering for investigation as there do seem to be problems with the D7800 firmware and drivers.

I really hope this is not the case with the R9000!!!!!

Ian

[raven_au]

Hi all,

One followup to the initial post.

After around 36 hours of working ok I decided to try an AC2166 device again to check whether the problem was the additional connection from the NAS to the router that was causing a problem.

Firing up an AC2166 router as a bridge, communication rapidly fell to zero over the wireless link, and remained there, so the likleyhood there is an incompatibility between the D7800 AC1766 and Broadcomm AC2166 wireless is high. It's tempting to say it's probably the bridge device and not the D7800 but I had problems with two different AC2166 devices and if you would like me to check with a Netgear device then fix the wireless bridge functionality of the R8500!

After removing this device, and rebooting the D7800 (in case of residual problems from the above), and also rebooting the AC1733 bridge I was about to use I carried out a simple throughtput test, as described above. The result was unimpressive but the device being used as the bridge was the Quantenna device so it's not unexpected. I got around 55-60 mega bytes per second from the NAS to my PC (over the bridge link of course, yes, not very good compared to what I have seen) and around 75-80 mega bytes from my PC to the NAS which is actually close to what I've come to expect.

So that's about all for this little investigation.

Ian