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I received an update from support to try a roll back and glad to hear yours is working with it
My connectivity is working now bc I rolled back to my old ATT provided router. I was about to take this Netgear back but may try goin the to the previous version to see if it works. Tbh I’m kinda done with it especially as much time as have spent trying to get it to work. Also given the date since the current release, would expect NG to have fixed this by now.
I had similar issues like everyone else here, wifi would drop several times per day. The router was working just fine for a couple of years with just my phone and Chromecast, but after adding a new PC into the mix, the drops started happening. I even exchanged my laptop into a different brand as I thought it was the laptop's fault! Didn't help, same thing on the new one.
I disabled MU-MIMO (also disabled all the guest network stuff and turned QoS on) and the drops stopped, hasn't been happening anymore for a couple of days. Before it went off several times per day, every day.
I wish there was even some acknowledgement of this issue, or some reassurance that this issue is being looked into, but I guess we won't be getting it here.
(Firmware is V1.3.1.64_10.1.36, R7000P on 5GHz wifi with a smartphone, PC, Chromecast)
Model: R7000P|Nighthawk AC2300 Smart WiFi Dual Band Gigabit Router
I've spent the last nine months trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with this thing. I didn't find this thread until this evening, after Googling "R7000P lemon". I had already ripped this POS off my network and reinstalling an old, slow Asus router, and even obtaining, through unbelievable difficulty, an RMA from Netgear. I didn't want to spend on the return shipping for a swap if the problem was hardware or an intractable firmware issue that Netgear would never resolve, and I was prepared to just move on and get a WiFi 6 router.
After reading this thread, I manually reflashed the firmware, reconfigured the router as an AP, turned off MU-MIMO and implicit beamforming, and pointed a few high-use devices (laptops, phones, Roku) to the 5 Ghz radio. I then simultaneously streamed YouTube and Netflix on multiple devices. Night and day difference! No disconnections, no throughput loss, nothing.
Maybe I won't do the RMA afterall. This R7000P is still a POS, but at least it seems to be working as it should now. I haven't put all of the devices back on, so I might need to update my findings after I revert the whole network.
Model: R7000P|Nighthawk AC2300 Smart WiFi Dual Band Gigabit Router
I'd like to update that after making all the changes I discussed in my last post, the router has been more stable.
However, using my previous router, the Huawei HG659 as a benchmark, I can say that I still experience the below, which I didn't experience with my previous 'cheap' router:
- device will dropout at least one a day (due to lockdowns we always have at least 2 laptops + 2 mobiles on the network), i.e. you will see the wifi disconnect and then reconnect on the laptop
- needed a restart once since I made the changes: this was a significant improvement, but with the cheap Huawei, I never had to restart it
I did however opt to connect the PS4 to an ethernet cable because we do all our streaming using the console, and I noticed that the wifi would be affected by it. This has helped a lot, it is worth noting that with the Huawei I could stream with the PS4, and all my devices would be connected without any problem.
All in all, I can say that all the changes I've done have improved the situation. If return policies in my country were generous I would've returned this product.
If you're reading this and you can still return the product, PLEASE RETURN IT. To ensure that it works you're going to have to disable a lot of features, and with those turned off, you might as well get a cheaper model or a different one altogether.
Given the choice again I would not purchase a n R7000P. What's on listed on the box doesn't actually work (looking at you MIMO). I've also found the QoS is pretty crap at managing settings and was actually slowing my internet quite substantially.
Before switching to DD-WRT, downgrading the firmware to v1.31.1.26 (R7000P-V1.3.1.26_10.1.3.chk) did a decent job regarding stability. This included keeping MIMO disabled.
Yeah I just bought mine the other day. After about 12 hours, started dropping 5G to the internet. Tried a bunch of settings and firmware refreash. The only thing that seemed to fix it was disabling MU-MIMO. Pretty pathetic that you have to disable a main setting to make a brand new router work. By the sound of it here, Netgear does not seem to care. Probably going to take it back to Best Buy and get something else. Unacceptable Netgear!
Model: R7000P|Nighthawk AC2300 Smart WiFi Dual Band Gigabit Router
Yeah I just bought mine the other day. After about 12 hours, started dropping 5G to the internet. Tried a bunch of settings and firmware refreash. The only thing that seemed to fix it was disabling MU-MIMO. Pretty pathetic that you have to disable a main setting to make a brand new router work. By the sound of it here, Netgear does not seem to care. Probably going to take it back to Best Buy and get something else. Unacceptable Netgear!
Get something else. All of us in this thread had to 'dumb down' our routers to get it to work. Swap it while you can!
Found this thread after my R7000P started having the connection drop-out issue in the past 2 weeks. Like alot of people here my wife and I have both observed this happening anywhere from 2-4 times per day. Only changes to settings I made were the normal ones: login settings, wifi SSID/pw, and assigned my NAS to a static IP and that's about it - left everything else on stock settings. Didn't enable Guest network ever, etc.
Currently I'm running V1.3.1.64_10.1.36 firmware and the router seemed to be working solidly prior to this issue since it was purchased in May 2019. I turned off MI-MIMU and turning on QoS as suggested before...hopefully this will work. Not ready to throw in the towel yet!
Worst comes to worst I'll load a 3rd party firmware, probably DD-WRT. I had the R7000 before that need frequently reboots (so effing annoying) until I loaded DD-WRT onto it and presto! it became a rock solid router for years. I remember reverting it back to stock being not-so-straightforward which is why I want to avoid going down that route again.
Model: R7000P|Nighthawk AC2300 Smart WiFi Dual Band Gigabit Router
I've had this router for about 8 months and just stared having the 5ghz wifi drop out issue the past three days. Nothing has changed on my network, so it's frustrating. I have disabled MU-MIMO as per the advice in this thread, so lets see if it works.
I had DD-WRT on this router but would not recommend using it if you have gigabit internet. With DD-WRT I could never get above 250mb/s which is a shame because I do like DD-WRT. Reinstalling factory firmware and I can get 800mb/s.
Model: R7000P|Nighthawk AC2300 Smart WiFi Dual Band Gigabit Router
I had an R7000 (not p) that started randomly dropping the 5ghz band after years of being very stable (I hadn't changed anything recently on the settings, nor did I change the firmware). It reminding me of overheating problems I've experienced on other routers before they failed, but I never got around to testing it as I just bought a new one.
Long story short: has anyone tried to pop the top and blow a cooling fan on the unit to see if it helped?
Thanks for the info re: DD-WRT - you probably save me a few hours of work 🙂
Turning off mu-mimo + turning on QoS seemed to improve the drop out issue as I haven't experienced it since making those changes.
I was googling for a program/app/whatever to monitor my actual wifi up-time and found a simple site - just search "star trinity internet connection monitor". I'm gonna leave it running on my laptop for at least the day to make sure all is well... or not.
@phetamine Yeah, I purchased the R7000P for the strict reason to run DD-WRT on it so I could a scrip that gave me run per-device bandwidth usage. Comcast was capping my data to 1TB a month and I was constantly going over it so I needed a way to determine which device was taking up so much data, and as ridiculous as it sounds, the only way to do it was installed DD-WRT on a router and running custom scripts.
DD-WRT was a PITA to get running on the R7000P. There wasn't any click-her-to-flash easy to run stuff like other DD-WRT capable routers. The R7000P seems to be a fringe router for DD-WRT so you end up running some modified version of some beta firmware that you can't even find online anymore (author isn't making it anymore and all downloads for it were 404) and I had to ask someone for the flash files on Reddit and it was never being updated.
Eventually I was able to upgrade to Xfinitiy's X1 gigabit internet service which includes unlimited data. Unfortunately, after that upgrade, I was still barely able to break 250mb/s with DD-WRT on the router. I went through the painful process of trying new DOCSIS 3.1 modems, messing with every setting I could find on the X1 router, putting the X1 in bridge mode, even new Cat6 cables. Nothing worked until someone told me that DD-WRT is on most levels emulating hardware compression and it will never be able to obtain the raw processing speeds and power of an unmodified router running Netgear's firmware.
So I reset it back to factory settings and immediately was at 750mb/s or higher. Plus, uPNP worked better for some of the family's games (it never worked well with DD-WRT).
Anyway, time to see if my 5ghz drops out again. Only seems to happen at night, as crazy as that sounds. When it drops out the only way to fix it is to reboot the whole router, or go into the admin area and disable and re-enable the 5ghz radio.
@joejoeinc Read my mind! I was going to ask in another thread how to get better/more detailed logs from the R7000P.
What is the process for using that? Is the Start Capture button ONLY for packet capture, and do you think I should use Packet Capture to determine what's going on when my 5ghz radio dies?
Or is it already generating log files just by being powered on and I just have to download them?
Open the debug URL.. configure your log settings and then hit 'start capture'. Now try to force the error/issue you are having. Then stop the capture and then download it.
Model: R7000P|Nighthawk AC2300 Smart WiFi Dual Band Gigabit Router
Any idea what to look for in the log file bundle? Just happened again tonight, at 7:15 (always seems to happen at night). 5ghz radio starts to lag hard - pings to sites taking 2000ms, then dies entirely.
2.4ghz radio is fine, so I just switch over to it's SSID while troubleshooting.
