RAX120 Stability

Have you tried the router without aggregation. I know you will,lose some speed but would be interesting to see if it's stable. 

Just factory reset and configured without WAN aggregation, we’ll see if that’s the culprit.

I tried this on my last unit but continued to have issues even on a single WAN input. I believe DNS issues were to fault back then that I was having in addition to this problem, so I wasn’t able to pinpoint what was causing the issues. Will update in a few days’ time if it ends up being what’s triggering these stability issues.

Welp, wishful thinking but turns out WAN aggregation isn’t the culprit for the speed drops I’m facing approximately every 2 days. 1 day and 22 hours into a single WAN setup, the same issues arose.

I’ve attached the dashboard view right before a reset showing single WAN and uptime, along with speed tests before and after a router reboot. These symptoms match exactly what I was facing previously in the images posted above.

Again, this was after factory resets and fresh setups in both configurations. This is also the second RAX 120 exhibiting this issue on multiple firmware versions. At this point it looks like back to Netgear this RAX120 goes. This headache during this time of teleworking just isn’t worth the 200-300 Mbps I gain with running this over my prior equipment.  

Two routers could go wrong there are bad batches sometimes with hardware from nay comany, but I have never experienced your issue, I wonder if its specific to your set up. What modem have you got? Have you tried turning off AX? Since the last two firmwares AX is on by default, it could be your hardware is not working well with AX? You can make the RAX120 a AC router by just turning off AX, make sure you turn off PMF and MU-Mimo, also don't force 160Mhz.

 I also am confused with your DNS setup why have Cloudflare, which is private from your ISP's gaze and then googles which the world and its dog can see? In fact why change them from your ISP? Try running just the servers your ISP gives you and dont play with those settings to see if because you are using a third part DNS server they maybe are further away so CDN delivery is being affected in speedtests and downloads as its not selecting the closest servers to you, which yoiur ISP would. In all honesty if your ISP run servers with DNNSEC there is no pint in changing them. If I were to change Open DNS I think works better, I tend to leave this stuff alone as it givs very little gain to the user anyway. Try DNS first to see what happens then work backwards to it just being an ac router if problems persist

Thanks for the feedback! I’m running an ARRIS SURFboard SB8200. When resetting I’ve tried rebooting them as a pair and standalone, and the only method that resolves the issue is when the router is reset, regardless of if the modem is as well which to me points to the router as the culprit.

Very good catch on my DNS settings, though that’s a result of attempted troubleshooting and not how I normally run things. I typically run through a Pi-hole pointed at a single provider but haven’t been running it to try and eliminate as many variables as possible. Earlier this month when I received this second router, I ran on ISP DNS servers until I encountered the issues. As the first telltale symptom of my problem is the huge spike in latency, I wanted to see if it could be a DNS problem and began changing my primary servers around. When choosing a speed test server, however, it still always picks the one not too far from me.

I attempted switching off AX on my previous troubleshooting of my first device, but worth a shot this time around I suppose since I still am not running any AX devices. Will take your suggestions and disable AX, PMF, and MU-Mimio and report back if there’s any changes.

Thanks again for your input

Unfortunately, even when disabling AX, PMF, and MU-Mimo the problem still persists. 1 day and 11 hours after changing settings, the speed drops arose on both AC and wired connections. The logs again show nothing noteworthy upon checking before reboot.