So i bought the XR500 last month and since i have bought this router ive had a lot of problems. But for this post im going to stick to the wifi calling. Everything time i use the WiFI feature is not working well at all. when my wife or i try to make calls on our phones people have a hard time hearing us and it breaks up alot. and at our household we have to have wifi calling because our service provider signal is bad in that area. Before i bought this router we had the r7000 netgear router and we both stills have the same phones. so please give me some pointers on what i can do to make the wifi calling better. whensurfing the internet on the devices there is no issue at all only doesnt work good at all with the wifi calling
Hi Sean - it's tricky to help you with this one as it's a NETGEAR issue. Do you have Smart Connect on WiFi enabled? If not, do you know which band you are connecting to (5GHz or 2.4GHz)?
I often find WiFi calling takes about 10-30 seconds to activate when I first connect to the router. I assume you are not seeing it at all over a period of time?
Hi Sean - it's tricky to help you with this one as it's a NETGEAR issue. Do you have Smart Connect on WiFi enabled? If not, do you know which band you are connecting to (5GHz or 2.4GHz)?
I often find WiFi calling takes about 10-30 seconds to activate when I first connect to the router. I assume you are not seeing it at all over a period of time?
my wifes phone and my phone are connected to the 5GHZ. my yeah it usally takes about 30 seconds to start ringing but also at times it will not ring at all. smart connect is enabled ive disasbled and it and nothing changed. i have the iphone 8plus my wife has the iphone10x or whatever it is called she has hdr-10 on hers. my netgear r7000 was great with wifi calling up until i got this one. smart connect was turned on also for that router as well
Did you ever get this fixed? I'm about to throw my XR500 out of the window, Never had an issue with my previous router at all with WIFI calling and with the XR500, its' spotty as hell, at best.
My WIFI Calling works (as in calls connect AFAIK, don't know if I missed calls), but the problem seems to be I drop calls like crazy. I get call failed when I never used to see that on my Orbi. Are you all seeing that as well?
It's probably a question best directed to NETGEAR's technical support. WiFi calling works great on it on our office and I know is thoroughly tested by NETGEAR, so it's possible you have a config issue.
Do you have trouble with WiFi calling on other phones? And do you have UPNP enabled on your router (>Settings >Advanced)? The router needs to port forward a particular port to your phone to get WiFi calling to work (and UPNP will do this automatically).
Smart Connect, Beamforming and MIMO are all enabled. I am connected to the 5Ghz band Channel 161 after doing a quick scan in my neighbourhood as it's the least congested. Security mode is WPA2 with AES. Unfortunately, so luck still.
I have disabled 11K too. Is it safe to keep it disabled or should I re-enable it? What does it do?
Lets try disabling Smart Connect and MIMO and test again on 5ghz.
What OS version is loaded on the phone?
11k is Fast Roaming. It can be left disabled. You can enable it later again if you want to try it.
@Retired_Member wrote:
Appreciate the suggestions.
Smart Connect, Beamforming and MIMO are all enabled. I am connected to the 5Ghz band Channel 161 after doing a quick scan in my neighbourhood as it's the least congested. Security mode is WPA2 with AES. Unfortunately, so luck still.
I have disabled 11K too. Is it safe to keep it disabled or should I re-enable it? What does it do?
I use Smart Connect and Beamforming. Manual channels 11 and 36. MIMO and 11k is disabled for me. However I'm using iOS 11.4. I'm seeing various posts about users having bad expeirneces with iOS 12. Something you may want to also look into. So some searching on apple suppot forums as well.
Is this the only phone you have when using it with the XR router? Any friends or family you can have come over and run some quick tests with? If those have problems as well, check iOS versions.
Try this, disable WPA security temporarily on the XR router. Have the phone reconnect to the open SSID. Test. Same thing still happening? Re-enable WPA2 and AES only after checking.
I presume this would need to be reviewed by NG support.
Yup, just tested with manual channels 1 and 161. 11K and WPA disabled.
My family members all use iPhone and previously had no issues with Wifi Calling on our previous routers. Only happened after switching to the XR500.
Appreciate you taking time to help out! One last question, do you have UPnP enabled? I had it disabled on my previous routers and could still get Wifi Calling to work. I have tested with it enabled and disabled to no avail.
