I just purchased a Nighthawk X4 modem and I'm having seriously slow speed connections using it. I pay for a 50mps internet connection which consistently tests in the 60-70 mps range when using my older router (A Netgear R6300). But when I change over to the Nighthawk, my speeds drop to 5-6mps and I'm having constant troubles with devices being disconnected or will simply stop working. This is a home network and we have 3 smart TV's, two Amazon Fire boxes, a Chromecast. 4 iPhones (6 and 6+), a Samsung G5, 5 iPads, 3 laptops and 5 desktop computers that all use the network. The main reason I got the new router was the old R6300 would lock up about 3 or 4 times a week for unknown reasons. The Nighthawk worked awesome for about a day and then has turned into a nightmare with slow speeds 100% of the time now and the devices suddenly not being able to connect multiple times a day. If I reboot my Cable modem and Nighthawk router, I can get the speeds to increase into the low twenties for a short time, but then will drop back down into the 5-6mps range and stay there with random disconnects until I reboot it. If I plug in my old router speeds immediately go back up to normal any everything works fine.
I will also mention I also purchased the Netgear AC1200 Wi-Fi USB Adapter High Gain Dual Band USB 3.0 (A6210-100PAS) connector for my main PC and this makes no difference on speed or quality of connection. I have just as many problems as all the other devices in the house.
I guess I'm wondering if there are some settings I can change to fix this (I've looked around a fair amount and made some changes with no luck) or if I have a defective router.
Try shutting off the WMM (wifi multimedia) under the advance tab / qos setting.
I found it was overly aggressive in molding my internal traffic. I relied on the regular qos to learn the devices in my network and everything moves better now.
Sorry for the slow response. I was out of town for a few days. I attempted to turn off WMM and unfortunately made no difference. I also went through randomly turning off and on just about every option I could find and nothing I attempted made any difference.
I followed Minions08's advice and have created a support ticket. I'll give Netgear a few days to resolve this, but if it's not successful then I'm going to send this back as I unfortunately don't really have the time to be spending hours and hours and several weeks trying to get this to work. It's a pain having to switch cables back and fourth.
Had my router yesterday and have already noticed the same behaviour. I have BT Infinity and would consistently get 73mb in download tests, however with this router I get 68mb max (which is fine) but this will randomly drop to a crawl of 3-6mb for no apparent reason. Sometimes it will recover by itself, sometimes I will reboot it.
Also, copying files from my Mac wirelessly to a HDD attached to the router can change in estimated time from 7mins to 48mins for the same sized file - again for no apparent reason.
Im not going to jump to conclusions, maybe the router is learning, so I plan to leave the router running for a week or so and see if it settles down. If not I won't be fussing around with offshore callcentres etc, I'll return it for a refund and try an Asus or go back to my previous (ageing but consistent) router.
If you are running Dynamic QOS you could change the "I want to define my Internet bandwidth" and input your true Download/Upload speeds then "Apply". If that does not help you could also click on the "Click here to see bandwidth utilization by device and application" at the bottom of the Dynamic QOS window or just to go the "Attached Devices" window and select the Bubble for the device you would like to edit and click on the "Edit" button and set that device to "HIGHEST" then "Apply" and see if that improves your performance.
I don't have Dynamic QOS enabled. I have kept it simple and have any non AC devices connected to 2.4Ghz and I have all my AC devices connected to 5Ghz.
interesting, have you tried enabling the Dynamic QOS with what I suggested above and see if that helps or changes anything. Side note: under "I want to define my Internet bandwidth" you could also try changing the Download/Upload to 1000 and hopefully forcing the router to use all your bandwidth. Also I assume you have Internet Traffic Meter disabled ? Another option is preforming a hard reset on the router many devices seem to preform better if you do a hardware reset just after preforming a firmware/bios update.
I didn't bother with Dynamic QoS as the router should perform the basics without needing it. I did however do a pinhole reset and re-configured the router but the results are the same.
I did a few speed tests last night with the Nighthawk X4 and then immediately switched to the free BT Home Hub 5 that I have and performed them again, the results were as follows:
* Consistently higher downloads speeds with the home hub (by about 4mb) * Consistently higher uploads speeds with the home hub (by about 4mb) * Pings around 20-30ms with the home hub * Pings around 140ms with the Nighthawk X4
That alone is worrying as the home hub is NOT a particularly good router. The following are the general problems I have when using the Nighthawk X4, bare in mind I have none of these problems with my other routers (I also own a Netgear DGND3700):
* Webpages loading slowly or missing graphics * Emails with HTML in them missing pictures/graphics/logos * VPN connection to work disconnects and cannot reconnect * Inconsistent download speeds which drop from 68mb to 3-6mb for no reason
As soon as I connect my cheap free AC router form BT everything returns to normal, and in fairness Im getting very good speeds from it. Im sending the Nighthawk X4 back today for a full refund. Im really disappointed as I was looking forward to this being my router for the next few years. I have also looked at the competition but to be honest, they don't fare much better at the moment either.
The ONLY things that the Nighthawk X4 did well were using a USB drive as a network drive (which performed excellently) and the wireless range was awesome. Neither justify the high cost though. Damn shame but life is too short to spend hours trying to configure it into some sort of working order so I'll dip back into the high end AC router market again further down the line.
yup, it seems like you've done most of the testing I would have though I use my systems wired mostly except when I am walking around the house with a cell/tablet/lapper. I simply don't uses wireless as my primary means of connection. I ran cat 6 through the walls. With that in mind I am not seeing the wireless connections fluctuate as you are.
Back again. I was never able to get my problem resolved and went back to my old R6300 router with the annoying periodic lock-ups. After a few weeks of dealing with that annoyance, I went out and purchased a Netgear R6100-AC1200 router a few days ago and much to my annoyance, I'm having the same slow download problems I had with the Nighthawk. I haven't had the disconnects yet that I had with the Nighthawk, but the fastest download speed I've been able to get so far has been around 20mbs and within short order drops down into the single digits. Webpages that used to load instantly now take an eternity and if the page is graphics heavy I just exit out as I'm not willing to wait the time it takes for everything to load. If I put my old R6300 back on, my speeds instantly go back up to normal.
At this point I guess I'm going to pass on Netgear products for the foreseeable future as I just don't have the time or the inclination to spend the hours and hours I've already spent trying to get these routers to work properly. I've done all the suggestions given and at best, for me, they provide a few minutes to a few hours of improved service before my speeds once again drop to a crawl.
Go buy the Asus RT-AC87. With the latest firmware its fast and solid.
CC
I'm involved with Asus on troubleshooting a major fault in the RT-AC87. Asus didn't listen to Quantenna when building the router, and as a result their having serious overheat issues with the QSR1000, Quantenna's 5 GHz chipset, which are causing connectivity issues. The chipset is holding at 85° C even when idle, and it fails at 90° C.
On Netgear and other routers using Quantenna chipsets, the instructions from Quantenna are followed and on those routers the QSR1000 happily hums along under load at 55-60° C. There are some firmware issues with the Quantenna chipsets which are being worked on now.
As for Asus, a recall of the AC87 is under serious discussion by their corporate office due to almost 30% AC87 router replacement due to Quantenna processor overheat failure. Just something I thought everyone should be aware of before recommending the AC87.
I have a brand new X4S and had similar problems. ADSL 2+ dropped from 18Mbs to 10Mbs down and 1.03Mbs up went to around 700kbs. I use primarily LAN connection and WiFi was not tested.
After speaking to Netgear support and worked through a whole range of issues most of which I discounted as not going to fix anything and some were ridicuous like change the wifi channel... . I backed up all of the settings we had applied, reset to factory defaults using a HARD reset with paper clip, restored the settings and the speed almost doubled.
It looks like there is a definite need to reset the device to factory defaults before setting up. This is something most people would not do but if all else fails try a factory reset but dont forget to take a backup first of your config settings. Support will not tell you that you can save your settings so if a new user make sure you do the export first. ... Particularly if you have set up a special lan address range and opened ports. You will need to start up with new settings and I do suggest you use the auto discover settings. Although it did not change much from my manual setup it may have changed something in hidden settings.
As far as I am aware there was no release note. There was a little booklet that set out how to cable up. The router was already configured so it didnt look like it needed a firmware reset and was already using the latest firmware ... but what amazed me was it almost doubled the performance of the device after the factrory hardboot reset. I didn't expect that.
I am really happy with the unit. The smallest possible gripe might be that the label names for reserved IP devices might be a bit short and another 10 or so charaters would be great. However it is interesting that in the "display attached devices screen" I think you can have a lengthy device name/description.
One nice feature was the ability to assign a small icon to each device and when you have 30 or so devices on the network its great to see what they all are with a little image. Well laid out advice of what is on wifi and what bandwidth etc.
The WiFi performance so far has been excellent. I would have liked to be able to do more with the firewall, like add it to some subscription managed service or have the ability to control DoS attacks ie limit IP address ranges. I haven't found where to do that yet. We have already had port sniffers looking to penetrate the network on common open UDP ports. ie RDC etc.
Overall I rate this device very highly even with such a high price. It feels like a decent piece of kit and has a substaintial solid feel to it.It also has a very solid connection without disconnects but early days. The auto connect button fior WiFi devices works a treat.
We have a few Netgear switches, POE switches and managed switch and all have performed flawlessly for some years. I highly recommend this modem/router.
