Nighthawk M1 MR1100-100EUS: unable to use 40MHz wide channels on 2.4GHz

[n3t]

Yesterday I bought a Nighthawk M1 MR1100-100EUS from Amazon Germany (i.e. the unbranded retail version sold in Europe). It immediately suggested an OTA update after which the device and firmware version numbers are as follows:

Hardware Version:	1.0
Firmware Version:	NTG9X50C_12.02.07.00
GUI Version:		MR1HDATA_04.01.59.00
PRI Version:		03.02
Bootloader Version:	NTG9X50C_12.02.07.00
Firmware Build Date:	2018/03/05

I cannot seem to get 40MHz bandwith at 2.4GHz — yes I can select this setting, but my M1 will ignore it and only ever use 20MHz.

Is this to stay backwards compatible with ancient 802.11b/g devices? I don't have any of those, I only want 802.11n/ac. Why can't I select this anywhere? Virtually all other WiFi routers I know support such a setting nowadays.

With 20MHz the maximum speed on 2.4GHz is only 72Mbit/s per antenna — and with WiFi offloading it seems to only use one antenna.

(I can get 144Mbit/s (i.e. 2x MIMO) at 2.4GHz if I neither use the 5GHz network concurrently nor WiFi offloading, but using a channel width of 40MHz it should be 300Mbit/s.)

Has anybody been able to get 40MHz to work?

PS: I am also annoyed that my M1 doesn't charge above a device and battery temperature above about 43°C, i.e. it basically cannot be charged during operations. See my findings here: https://community.netgear.com/t5/Mobile-Routers-Hotspots-Modems/netgeart-m1-battery-problem/m-p/1572...

The M1 is such a nice device on paper, but in reality it seems to be quite restricted both in hardware and firmware. 

[MAGADE]

If you are using a MACBOOK pro 2012 as me, try to select compatible channel wifi. In my case, select compatible wifi channel get succes to connect my macbook on 2.4 and 5ghz wifi.

[n3t]

Thank you. What is "compatible channel wifi"? I don't know such a setting from neither my MR1100 nor MacOS X.

Also to perhaps make it more clear, I don't have any problem connecting to neither the 5GHz nor the 2.4GHz WiFi networks that my MR1100 creates. It's just that the 2.4 one only ever uses a bandwidth of 20MHz which limits the maximum possible connection speed to 1/2.

(The channel bandwidth on 5GHz is 80MHz which is the usual setting for 802.11ac, so no complaints here.)

[JasonN]

Hi n3t,

Thank you for posting in the community. Your device is unable to band select. This is because your device is on auto which allows it to be able to choose the best band connection in your area. As for your device being plugged into the charger with the battery in while in use, That is not recommended. Especially when the battery is at full charge because this will overcharge the battery which can reduce the battery life.

Please let me know if you have any other questions. :]

- Jason N

[n3t]

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@JasonN wrote:

Thank you for posting in the community. Your device is unable to band select. This is because your device is on auto which allows it to be able to choose the best band connection in your area. As for your device being plugged into the charger with the battery in while in use, That is not recommended. Especially when the battery is at full charge because this will overcharge the battery which can reduce the battery life.

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Hi Jason, thank you very much for your reply. Unfortunately I am not satisfied with both points raised:

Ad 1. — I also tried to the manual channel setting together with 40MHz, but still got a 20MHz wide channel even then. I'll keep trying, but in the meantime it would be interesting to know if 40MHz does work for anybody else.

Ad 2. — Li-Ion batteries are actually very easy to charge properly compared to other, older battery chemistries: There are only two phases, a CC (constant current) phase followed by a CV (constant voltage) phase. In the latter — which is used for the final about 10% of the battery capacity — a fixed voltage is applied to the battery by the charging electronics, and the charging current will automatically drop to zero when the battery voltage reaches the charging voltage (law of electronics). Therefore it is not possible to overcharge a Li-Ion battery if the charging electronics are properly implemented, which Netgear should be able to accomplish as this is indeed state of the art and not at all complicated.

Some previous chemistries like NiCd and NiMH required the charger to meticulously monitor the voltage curve in order not to miss the exact point in time when the battery cells were full — providing energy beyond this point would indeed adversely affect the health of the cell. With Li-Ion this is no longer needed, above a certain voltage threshold the cell is basically directly connected to a constant voltage supply the amount of which equals the target voltage of about 4.35V per cell in case of the battery type used by the M1. So the charger only needs to limit the current during the CC phase and apply the fixed voltage of 4.35V afterwards in the CV phase. It gets a bit more complicated if two or more cells are connected in series and the charger is supposed to balance them, but all this is nowadays implemented in integrated circuits from multiple vendors which are proficient with battery charging. These chips are inexpensive off-the-shelve commodities as virtually every modern device depends on Li-Ion nowadays, and I bet Netgear uses them, too.

In fact a lot of devices have their Li-Ion batteries builtin nowadays so they cannot be taken out by the customer. And yet these are all correctly handled and not overcharged at all when left connected to external power. Not only Apple gets this right, almost everybody else does, too. So please don't tell me Netgear designed their latest and greatest, all-time-fastest LTE router with botched charging electronics...