i am thinking of upgrading to RAX80. on amazon one of the q&a says it will work with any modem. we have xfinity with cable internet service up to 1000mbps. what modem do you recommend to go with RAX80? right now we have c7000v2 (modem/router combo) with a few extenders and have found the coverage to be ok, but that with the amount of devices in our smart equipped home, its hard to connect everything at once. We have 12+ cameras, doorbell, 4 fire sticks, 5 pcs/laptops, garage opener, door lock keypad, 2 smart phones, 2 tablets, wifi vacuum, a bunch of echo and echo dots, xbox, and probably more I'm not thinking of. We looked at mesh too, but honestly I'm just getting more and more confused. Also considering the RAX50. Our house is 3 floors including a basement with only drywall walls, and about 3000sqft total and the router will be on the main floor (middle level) Thanks!!!!!!!
If you're needing extenders, you'd probably be better off to go with a mesh system.
reason why is the upgrade to AX didn't add a whole lot of extra range. What it added that's big was concurrent broadcast (communication with more than 1 device at a time)
the move the mesh would add seamless roaming, better coverage, and more stability. But I'd recommend the triband mesh systems and not the dual band.
In terms of modems on xfinity capable of gig speeds:
CM1000
CM1100
CM1200 (wouldn't recommend on xfinity)
CM2000
All are docsis 3.1 and so compatible with gig speeds.
@Kttiekat wrote: What if we replaced our current extenders with the eax80? Keeping the c7000 modem/router?----Extenders rely on the router, so even though the extender is AX its running off an AC system so won't perform better than the AC devices.
And if not, what mesh systems do you recommend? The wifi5 or wifi6 orbi?---Depends on performance needs and budget. I have a lot going on at my place and an AC system it fine.
I've used the orbi RBK53 and RBK43 system and both have worked great for me. I haven't used the AX series so far. Maybe in the future but I can't justify the cost right now. Plus I can hit 200mbps+ over wireless and hit gig speeds wired so it covers all my needs.
If you don't pay for gigabit speeds, the c7000 can be switched over to modem only mode. Then you can hook a mesh system to it without problems.
Thanks. Have a 5 and 3 year old boys who are also remote school right now too. That’s what sparked this. Their chrome books don’t like to both connect at the same time and I’ve had to use my hotspot on my iPhone for one of them when they need to be on at the same time. We just have too many devices competing for signals. Our Xfinity plan is “up to 1gb” but obviously when I run speed tests on WiFi it’s a lot less. We do stream quite a bit of content. But not worried about it being 4K or anything. We just hate buffering. Di$ney+ Through the firestick is used a lot in our house of little boys.... and then our blink security cameras and our iPhones. And now school chrome books using google meet. I keep telling my husband the AC is probably fine but he’s worried about it not being enough especially in a few years. We added our current extenders when we were having trouble with too many devices connecting to our 2.4 network and occasionally low signal in our basement. But the c7000 has really had fairly good range for us even for our few outdoor blink cameras. We have almost no devices connected to the extender networks and it’s super annoying when for example, my iMac automatically connects to one of our extenders and it’s super slow and I have to change networks anyway. So in my mind, our current extenders are useless and if a new router can get us *slightly* more sqft range but also handle the load of tons of devices at the same time, I’m good with it. I don’t want to spend $1k. And really not even $500, would like to be under that if we can. I did read we could use the c7000 as a modem, but didn’t know if that is going to just cause us the same issues. Hope I’m making sense. I would just go to Best Buy and pick their brains but getting out of the house is about impossible these days and really just not comfortable with a newborn. ☠️
The cbr40 won't hit gigabit speeds for most providers beause its not docsis 3.1. The C7000 and the CBR40 have the same internal modem. You use your C7000 as a modem and just go with the RBR40 version/kit. If you got the kit, it either comes with 1 or 2 satellites depending on the kit you get.
Plus that way if you ever did want to go to gigabit, you could get a gigabit capable modem (see the ones outlined above) and run the rbr40 off it.
