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need some help here and i wanted to turn to the community. i've gone through the posts and it seems like this router just isn't very good, but i wanted to check to see if i'm doing anything wrong.
ever since this covid business, my wife and i are home and the problems with my router are getting ridiculous. for some reason, my nighthawk just stops working and i either have to reconnect from my computer(s), or power down/up the router. this happens at least once a day. my computer will no longer be connected and i have to reconnect. and other times i have to reboot the router. same with other devices connected to it, like my roku.
what things can i look into to fix? is running dual-band a problem? are there are any settings i should look to update or adjust?
i updated the firmware when the update was available. i've noticed a lot of negative feedback from the last version--88 i believe. i'm running my router dual-band with both 5mgz and 2.4 mgz. i do not have a guest network running.
one thing i noticed when i was originally troubleshooting was that ntp was not turned on and i did turn that on. seems like a minor thing but i made sure that this worked right.
should i downgrade my firmware? i've read that there is a stable previous version before 88.
should i just get a new router? it seems ridiculous that my wi-fi router is going out...in 2020. sure i've had this a couple years at least so it's not exactly brand new, but come on, is this something that i should really have to be dealing with?
thoughts and any advice on troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated. i'm not happy right now, and am about to just go out and buy an eero system.
Im in the same boat.. within the last few days my router has started to act up disconnecting all devices.. first time i rebooted both the modem and the router... In a few mins everything came back up... Over the next few days it continued to disconnect all devices.. i run a constant ping from my windows device to the router and when it goes down the router stops replying .. it starts to reply again a few minutes later when the router comes back up... I dont know if its crashing and rebooting or what... Firmware says it is also up to date v1.0.10.90... Definitely annoying..
Yah im one of those n00bs that posts firsts searches later... I did browse some forums after this post and noticed some gripes about some of the latest firmware.. I am not to sure why I couldnt update through the router passed v1.0.10.90... ive done a manual install of the v1.0.11.100 and will give that one a shot.. it says they addressed an issue where memory full errors we causing the router to crash.. cross fingers this one works a little better.. i also disabled automatic firmware updates... Ill take control of those from now on :). Thank you for the response!
@JG08@diavolos To be honest, this whole firmware update business with the R7000 AC1900 seems to be an issue that seemingly hasn't been resolved for at least the last two years when v.42 was/is apparently the only firmware that many users of the R7000 seem to advocate and trust. Would I personally rollback to a 2+ year old firmware on my own router? absolutely not because v.42 predated my router manufacture date (1st March 2019). V.42 might also have security holes that would expose my router to outside influences. What other users choose to do however, is their choice.
I purchased my R7000 unit at the begining of February 2020 with v.64 loaded out of the box and joined the Netgear Community to read of all of these issues and wondered maybe what I'd let myself in for. But the 'issues' never materialised, i.e. no dropping 5ghz WiFi. I made some immediate tweaks, the main one being disabling auto update. I've also disabled UPnP and router logging. Unfortunately, I'm unable to disable WPS which to me seems ridiculous that Netgear don't allow users to do.
Almost 2 months to the day from purchase, v1.0.11.100 hit Netgear's download page and so I upgraded the firmware from v.64. Three weeks in on the new firmware and still no problems, no issues whatsoever. I'm in the UK and I use a Draytek Vigor 130k modem. My ISP fibre package is 37mbps down and 9mbps up. I have absolutely no experience of the mega download speeds I often read of users here are on and nor will I probably for several years to come as cable just isn't offered in my locale.
So I'm wondering, what is so different about my one year old router that it isn't affected by random dropouts umpteen times a day without reason? I genuinely cannot answer that question. My Wife and I have been on lockdown at home now for 5 weeks and she works from home 5 days a week without interruption. My laptop is connected to 5ghz WiFi for up to 16 hours a day without dropouts. We watch our TV through a ROKU+ streaming stick on the 5ghz band for several hours a day, again, no dropouts. Our cell phones are connected via 5ghz band, I have Guest networks set up with no problems. Maybe, I'm just lucky?
It just seems that this issue with 5ghz WiFi is just going to keep on going. I wonder though just how many R7000 users have actually taken their issue to Netgear directly and complained? I tell you what though, if my router does start giving me problems, I won't keep it, I'll just dump it and move on to another brand.
here's what i'm going to try for now, and just documenting to see if this helps.
i'm turning off smart connect and the 2.4 ghz network and just going with the 5ghz network.
hoping that by taking things away, stability will improve.
like i said previously, on the 100 firmware version and no guest network enabled. i don't have any qos turned on either, or anything like parental controls. doubt either of those things hurt, but again, i don't know what to look at so i'm just laying everything out.
You know, the one thing I've not seen mentioned in any thread regarding 5ghz WiFi dropouts, is the fact that WiFi power standards do differ between countries. Clearly this Netgear Community is pretty exclusively USA centric, i.e. by comparison, there doesn't seem to be anywhere near the same level of input from UK or European users. The fact is, TX power on WiFi does vary from Country to Country and I'm beginning to wonder if this is part of the problem with the R7000 AC1900.
There is no option to change the TX power on the R7000, well at least I don't have that option. If it was an option previously available in a different firmware, I have no idea. So what about altering the Region on your router instead? So obviously if you are in the USA, try altering your region to Europe and see if that has an effect. It could be, that although there is no option to change TX power as a feature on the R7000, perhaps the TX power standards are 'hidden' within the router region settings and are auto applied when a particular region is selected?
This is obviously just out loud thinking on my part, but might be worth a shot to see if it has any effect on WiFi. It still strikes me as bloody odd that here in the UK, I'm not having any issues and yet across the Pond there appear to be constant issues with 5ghz WiFi band. My question is, why?
sorry i have not responded lately because i wanted to give a little more time, but now is as good of a time as any to give an update.
to recap what i chose to do, i turned off smart connect and i turned off enable 20/40
the two options i unchecked.
Enable Smart Connect - Let the router intelligently select the best WiFi band 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz for your WiFi connections. Smart Connect requires the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks to use the same WiFi network name (SSID), security options and password.
Enable 20/40 MHz Coexistence
and now what i do is depending on the situation i connect to either the 2.4ghz or 5ghz. for instance, if i'm just working like normal and i'm around my router, i just use the 5g network. but for some reason if i have to take a call and move to a farther away and to a quieter location, i just use the 2.4g network, because while the speed is less the coverage is better.
finally, i'm home working all day, so is my wife and my kids are on the internet all day. we would notice at least one drop-out per day, most of the time multiple drop-outs and sometimes needed to reboot the router.
anyhow....
stability is vastly improved. since i've made my configuration changes i think i've had two problems total. and i think one was related to a dos attack (from the logs) and the other was related to my internet actually going out. but aside from those two drop-outs, so far so good.
this was getting very frustrating for me, because like the rest of the world, i'm trying to be productive from home. it seems that not letting the router decide which network and and not enabling the 20/40 coexistence (in effect, making the router do less work) has stabilized the product some.
holding out hope that this fixes it, but will try to give another status later.
still holding steady. turning off smart connect seems to have stabilized the router quite a bit. sure, there's been one or two blips in the last couple weeks. but nothing like before.
New FW frequently drops between the 2.4 and 5 GHz freqs (mainly the 5ghz) multiple times throughout the day. The disconnected occurs for about a minute and then reconnects about a minute later. No reboot required, but the disconnects are annoying.
I flashed DD-WRT on the router and checked that out. No wireless issues while on DD-WRT. Switcvhed back to the Netgear FW because DD-WRT does not support my internet connection speed and seems to be limited.
The new FW still has issues from what I have experienced.
