I recently was just looking around in my router settings when I noticed a feature called Smart Connect. I thought it sounded great, so I went ahead and got rid of the "-5G" at the end of my 5G SSID. After enabling it and rebooting, I immediately noticed it just didn't work. My phone would disconnect from wifi about every 30 seconds to a minute. Attempting to log in to my router settings again would get 403 forbidden errors from both of my phones' browsers and my wired computer (on chrome, opera, IE) and I couldnt connect on the Nighthawk apps either. After restarting the router, I was STILL unable to log in from any browser, getting a 403 error each time. Luckily, I was able to login on the Nighthawk app and disable Smart Connect. After which point I can login via a browser no problem.
Has anyone found a way to make this work? Is there another setting I need to configure?
I also ran into this issue with my new CAX80 WiFi 6 Modem-Router. Enabling it caused issues with smart home devices (Smartplugs) that use the 2.4Ghz band and with Google Home/Chromecast devices that use both bands 2.4 or 5.0Ghz. The Google devices work, but they need to be configured with Smart Connect disabled. Once the Google devices are configured and you enable Smart Connect, I had to use the same name of the 5Ghz SSID in order for then to work. The 2.4Ghz Smartplugs failed to connect when Smart Connect was enabled even after they had been configured using the same SSID name as the 5Ghz. I'm starting to believe that this Netgear feature only works well with "newer" WiFi adapters that can use both bands. The Ubiquity Unifi AP that I installed in my sister's house using similar smart home devices, does not have this issue
In my case the router firmware is at version 1.1.041 and the Modem version is at 1.02.08 connected to Spectrum. Using WPA2-PSK [AES]. Just numbers and letters in the SSID 8 characters name. Everythings works fine otherwise except for the DNS IP reservations which work, but not consistently. Also, the B/W GUI performance is not as fas as that of my old Netgear WNDR4500 with color GUI that it replaced.
