This topic has been marked solved and closed to new posts due to inactivity. We hope you'll join the conversation by posting to an open topic or starting a new one.
Correct. I followed the initial flashing instructions in the link provided by rogier64. Pretty straightforward and everything seems to be running smoothly so far.
If you are on NG firmware go to the GUI page where you can flash the firmware. Just flash the .chk file as you would do with NG firmware. It is being adviced to do a factory reset before flashing the XWRT firmware to avoid out of memory issues.
back again with some bad update: after nearly 48 hours with 2.4 ghz (and 5.0) my router runs out of control again. 2.4 went down, 5 becomes unstable as well. To make it more worse my console freez and I had to reset the router to come back to live.
As I don´t see any offical regular updates nor any offical recommendation how to handle this bug nor any other reaction it seem to me that Netgear is happy to loose customers.
@ Netgear: if I am right with my assumption pls. do nothing, than I know how to advise my private community and my fiends in the field.
As promissed, I am back here with the result. After flashing the router with Advanced Tomato and let it run for 12 days straight, I am a happy camper. The speeds on both channel are pretty stable. 2.4Ghz has been solid 300Mbps and 5Ghz. has been around 480-560Mbps measuring from 30 ft distance (mind you, it's not as fast as Netgear has advertized even before I flashed the firmware anyway) Wi-Fi dropping has been a talk in the past and my sons are extremly graceful for what I have done LOL. You will have much more advance features in Advanced Tomato and the GUI is responding way faster. I've seen people hear asking if you still can do NATing and the answer is yes you can NAT up to 5 IP addresses. My advice, flash your Netgear router with either Advanced Tomato or DD WRT and dump the Netgear brand entirely. Trust me, you would be much happier. This will be my last post. Signning off.
Updated to this firmware and it added multiple seconds of latency to requests made from my Galaxy S8. Oddly didn't affect the performance to my two laptops. A factory reset did nothing, ended up having to enable dynamic QoS to solve the problem.
Model: R7000|Nighthawk AC1900 Dual Band WiFi Router
I could not take the dropouts any longer and it was also affecting my LAN speeds and one wired printer was constantly dropping.
I am now on xWRT-Vortex v.380 and It is night and day, I didnt even bother to factory reset before going to it as i knew my memory was good as i rebooted before flashing the .chk and it went off without a hitch. I now have all my devices stable for over 48 hours and my dropping printer and zycel extender just showed up instantly. On the stock FW I would have to reboot my printer to get it to even be pingable again let alone show up then it would just drop off after about 30 minutes. The extender took a few hours each time. My family has seen consitent and improved speed on the wifi throughput as well. I also like it's just barebones what you need or don't and no disney crap or other stuff. At this point if your going to ditch the device and don't want to be on a lower stock FW then give this a try first. I will be letting the comanpies (around 25) that have been asking me about their dropouts to go to this FW and not touch stock again for the time being.
Good luck to all still hanging onto Neatgears slow and very had handling of this issue going forward. To the ones running Debug firmware I hope you can help them resolve this.
Malcolm
EDIT: also wanted to say that I have the same setup as before for comparison on the stability:
2.4 and 5ghz bands with seperate SSIDS and passes both with ACL on and two guest networks.
Model: R7000|Nighthawk AC1900 Dual Band WiFi Router
I can say Netgear is working on problem and they have gotten the hardware component vendors involved also. I spent several hours yesterday testing scenerios, loading FW, sending logs, etc. We seem to be making progress. I am sure I am not the only one working with their engineers.
Again they are working on it and progress is being made. Hopefully fix is getting close.
Model: R7000|Nighthawk AC1900 Dual Band WiFi Router
Got the same message from Chen. I too declined. I already dumped the router for something else. I told him I couldn't wait any longer for Netgear to admit a problem. I have a business to run. Hopefully they get an answer in the next few months. If they are still asking for help, things can't be going too smooth. Good luck to all.
When installing Tomato firmware, I forgot to follow the instuctions to first do a factory reset.
It was unreachable. I thought OH NO, I bricked my router. But doing a reset afterward alowed me in.
It is nice when logging in to see the status page showing the tempetature of the cpu and the radios.
It's hard to brick a R7000, that's also one of the reasons I love the R7000 hardware. If you really screwed up you can flash in recovery mode of the router.
I just upgraded to the "wrt-vortex" firmware, Now if i was to revert to NG Firmware how would i go about doing so in the future?
It's usually as simple as uploading the stock firmware like you're upgrading the 3rd party firmware. But in the event it isn't you can try what was outlined here:
I just upgraded to the "wrt-vortex" firmware, Now if i was to revert to NG Firmware how would i go about doing so in the future?
It's usually as simple as uploading the stock firmware like you're upgrading the 3rd party firmware. But in the event it isn't you can try what was outlined here:
Well, not that easy. In XWRT-Vortex you can only flash .trx firmware files. As NG uses .chk files it will not work for XWRT-Vortex. In the forum (lots of interesting information) http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/asuswrt-merlin-on-netgear-r7000.71108/ you can find on page 1 the download link for old NG firmware version 1.0.3.80 in .trx format, you can use this file to flash from XWRT-Vortex to NG stock.
I started having problems at 1.0.9.12, figured Netgear was aware and updated to 1.0.9.14 and 1.0.9.18 whenever they were released. With 1.0.9.18 I couldn't go 24hrs without my 2.4GHz dropping out. My Honeywell Lyric thermostat and my WeMo Switches were always the first things to stop responding, and then my Echo and Echo Dot. Rebooting the router, or making any change to wireless (changing channels became a regular occurrence), would bring it back for a short time.
After spending way too much time fussing with it, I came here and read through this whole thread. I dropped my router back to 1.0.9.10 (last stable version I had) and was good for about 48hrs, then the 2.4GHz issues began again. 5GHz never had an issue (although speeds were terrible on 1.0.9.18 which was the only version I did speed tests on).
So, I went all the way back to 1.0.7.12, which seemed to work for most people on here. It did for me for about 72hrs. I really thought I was out of the woods, everything was speedy and running stable. Then, one evening, out of nowhere my Echo chimes that she's having issues connecting to the Internet. I checked my WeMo and every switch was offline. 5GHz was fine. Dammit.
At my wits end, I've taken the advice of several folks and yesterday morning did a factory reset and flashed XWRT-Vortex 380.69. After flashing (which was painless, BTW) I did another factory reset and reconfigured all my settings. 2.4GHz and 5GHz with different SSIDs and PW, single guest access on 2.4GHz (we have a duplex and provide WiFi to our tenants), no ACL and no QoS (I have 150Mbit XFinity connection).
Whole process took me less than an hour, and although it's only been 24hrs since then my speeds are still very fast and both bands and guest access have been rock solid. I'm impressed.
The hardware appears to be pretty decent on this router, just a shame Netgear can't get the software working correctly. I will report back again after a few days of testing, but as of right now I'm a happy camper running XWRT-Vortex.
Model: R7000|Nighthawk AC1900 Dual Band WiFi Router
I had exactly the same problems. And I also wasn't able to make it stable again. I bought a new Linksys WRT1900ACS. I needed a stable solution very quickly. My R7000 runs Advanced Tomato now. I use it as extra access point on the first floor. I have no good words for Netgear. It is totally over for me. Never Netgear again. Such a shame they can't fix it. Even using an old firmware is not stable anymore. How is that possible? And no communication about the reason or the status at this moment. What a terrible company.
Did you check to see if you have interference on the wifi channel you are using from neighboring routers? If not, this free Android app (Wifi Analyzer) can be used to help you determine the best wifi channel to use:
@jmooremcc With all respect but I work in the ICT for more than 25 years. I know what I am doing. I use channel 13 for 2.4GHz for years and also with my new Linksys WRT1900ACS now. After updating a lot of people got the same problems. What a coincidence. Netgear broke something and they know. They are working hard to fix it, let's hope. They already made some beta versions, all without success. And I know the analyzer app, who don't??
That's a good point to raise. I used several different WiFi Analyzers to make sure I wasn't on an over-utilized channel. For my neighbourhood channels 1, 4, and 11 on 2.4GHz were the most empty, so I would jump between them when I was on 1.0.9.18 to make my WiFi come back. On 5GHz I always stay on 153 which is empty besides me.
Now that I'm on XWRT-Vortex I have 2.4GHz on channel 1 and 5GHz on channel 153. No issues thus far.
Model: R7000|Nighthawk AC1900 Dual Band WiFi Router
Guys, be lucky you have a R7000 and not cheap crap, low budget brand. The hardware is somewhat outdated but still does the the job done. Feel sorry for NG but I'm sure they work on it. On the other hand it drove me to XWRT-Vortex for about 8 months ago. Never had any issues after switching, rock solid and nice features. Oh yea, you can turn off the unsecure WPS function as well.
