About a month ago I purchased the Netgear Nighthawk Mesh system with one satellite because the router provided by my service provider was not holding signal well enough to handle a teleconference. I am having very mixed results. The main router is located in the middle of the house where the internet comes into the house. My office is probably 30-40 feet away through a couple of walls. I set up the satellite there. In my office I have 2 computers, one for my personal business and one for my external business. Both of these computers are online most days with no difficulty. I personally have 2 phones both of which connect to the wifi in my home just fine but are usually in the office with me. While there have been a few instances of briefly dropping connection in my office, I have had next to no issues there. (I suspect those instances were more about the service provider, not the hardware.) My sister who lives with me has a Roku TV in her bedroom the door to which is directly across the room from the main router. However, according to the Network Map, her TV is connected to the Satellite in my office, not the main router across the dining room from her door. And this is where things get really strange. The rest of the house attempts to be connected through the main router. I imagine that I need another satellite upstairs, but have not yet invested in one because I have questions about the functionality of the main router. My phones work just fine up there, but my bedroom is over the dining room/kitchen area where the router is located. My daughters have a lot of trouble connecting their computers (less than 2 years old) and phones upstairs but their room is in the front of the house over the living room. The living room is connected to the dinning room and has only an archway, not a wall, between them. My smart TV, which I purchased at the beginning of COVID-19 quarantine, is in the living room. It frequently looses connectivity with the router and has to be rebooted. My younger children have old cell phones with no data plans that they use as gaming devices on wifi. They often come to me asking why they can't connect to the wifi. The same children are currently using brand new Kindle tablets to do ABC Mouse every day. They sometimes have trouble with the internet hanging up. My sister has an older computer and a Samsung tablet that sometimes have trouble connecting to the internet. A friend was visiting for the weekend recently. He sat at the dining room table with his laptop. He experienced the same connectivity issues there. Now, I should probably specify that we are an all android family. No Apple products allowed here. 8-) I should also say that while I am fairly tech savvy, I don't know all the ins and outs of this stuff. When we are experiencing the connectivity issues it seams to involve obtaining IP addresses. When I last spoke to NetGear and we updated the firmware, I asked if it was possible that the main router was faulty since everything connected through the Satellite seems to be fine, while the problems all seem to be stemming from the main router. I was told that was not possible. If the main router was faulty then the satellite would not be working properly either. So I am asking this community. Can anyone tell me why some devices connect just fine while others do not? Why the connections to the satellite appear to be stronger than the connections to the main router? Why it doesn't seem to matter the age of the device? And how do I know if it is just the ISP causing the problems and not the NetGear hardware or the devices?
