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Router Log-in
Hi, All of my devices but one seem to be on the 2.4gh band. Consequently the connection to the Roku stick is not great. I am trying to log into the router to change to Smart Choice so it will autom...
The best way is to enable Smart Connect, and let the technology work as it is supposed to do and to be.
IrvSp any proof Smart Connect does load balancing targeting the same number of clients on each radio?
schumaku, I went by reviews and what I've read.
For instance, from SMALL NET BUILDER site which I trust:
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The R8000's real promise is in improving total wireless throughput with mixes of client types. And here, the R8000 is a work in progress. NETGEAR chose to let the R8000 perform only a few tricks out of Broadcom's entire XStream technology catalog. So you might be better off manually assigning clients to its two 5 GHz radios, instead of using the very simple (and static) client assignment algorithms currently implemented.
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Given the capabilities I saw in Broadcom demos, NETGEAR appears to have dialed XStream's capabilities down to a very simple level. Radio assignment appears to be based strictly on supported link rates, not the actual link rate in use. And NETGEAR has said it disabled dynamic radio assignment, citing problems it found with some devices not liking being steered. This bears another look, which I will do in Part 2, along with OpenVPN performance and full wireless testing.
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A later review with more testing:
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Smart Connect
I mentioned earlier that I'm still finalizing the new SmallNetBuilder Wireless Testbed, so won't be presenting complete wireless performance data in this part of the review. Instead, I chose to explore NETGEAR's SmartConnect feature.
To recap, SmartConnect is NETGEAR's implementation of Broadcom's XStream architecture. SmartConnect uses two 5 GHz radios and assigns client to each one when they connect. The assignment is static until the connection between router and client is broken.
Dynamic client assigment is part of the XStream architecture, but vendors can choose which XStream features they use. NETGEAR told me they disabled dynamic client assignment because some devices "do not make a graceful switch".
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Now the R8000's f/w was updated recently to cover all 3 bands. Here is where I 'drew' the 'load balancing' from:
I guess I could have misread it though? Maybe that is how you can USE the Tri-bands, but when I had SC enabled and actually looked where the devices were I found mixes of N and AC on both 5Ghz bands and some N and AC even on the 2.4Ghz with all bands fairly even. Of course when a device left the LAN it was removed from the band so there were differences at some points when I looked. This was with the tri-band f/w.