RAX120 slowing down the AX connection to a few Mbps
Hi everyone,
Looks like I've have made a huge mistake and bought the super expensive Nighthawk RAX120. Since the day it arrived, only problems... A whole mess of them... It's so frustarating that I have thrown the damn thing on the floor during a rage episode (not a single piece of equipment drove me that crazy before, thanks a lot, Netgear!) and now the case is cracked so I cannot even return the junk for a refund. OK, I'll start with the most annoying one:
It only happens when a device is connected using 802.11ax and 5G. After some minutes (5 to 15 usually) of heavy internet traffic (say, an online game and/or a 4K video, something that runs at over 30Mbps download - just my estimation) the download/upload speeds degrades to around 2-3Mbps upload and 0.3Mbps upload, and the ping is abismal, around 30ms. The connection is not actually lost, it's just extremely slow, and it's stuck in this state until I reset the connection, either disconnect and connect again, or reboot the router, or reset the wifi card of the computer. If I let it in this almost stalled state, it seems to evetually recover by itself, but only after 1 hour (or so) of idle or no traffic.
I have removed all the predefined QOS rules and only left the WMM on. After a lot of struggles (thanks a lot Netgear for your super-buggy and super-slow software, it drives me nuts!) I managed to define new rules for the MAC addresses, setting all the computers in the house to high priority, but nothing changed, the problem is still there.
I have 2 laptops affected by the issue, both having Intel AX201 wifi cards. The other computers/devices in the house work fine, but those have either 802.11ac or 802.11b/g/n cards (Qualcomm and Intel chipsets). What is interesting is that even if I set the ax wifi cards to connect to ac standard, I still get the traffic stalled.
Some technical details:
- RAX120 router firmware: V1.0.1.114
- no QOS, except for WMM on both 2.4G and 5G radios
- laptop wifi card: Intel AX201 160MHz, driver version 21.30.2.1 by Intel
- the affected laptops are Razer Blade 13 and Maingear Element, both running Windows 10 Home
- the internet is over coaxial cable, the modem is an Arris TG2472 installed by the internet provider (no LAG)
I also have a lot of other issues with this trash (the next most annoying one is that the 5G network cannot establish new connections and I have to reset the router manually), but I'll stop here for now.
Have someone else oncoutered the same problem? Please help! Looks like I'll need to buy another wifi6 router (NOT Netgear, never again), but I thought to give it the last chance by asking the community here before trashing it (a $360.99 waste).
Re: RAX120 slowing down the AX connection to a few Mbps
OP. I have just upgraded the firmware to the latest one, 1.0.1.118. Even worse than before! Here, attaching a picture showing the blazing fast Netgear Nighmare RAX120 (that's right, it's 802.11ax and 5G).
Re: RAX120 slowing down the AX connection to a few Mbps
OP. It seems that disabling the AX from the router admin page solves the traffic stall issue, but I'm not sure yet (it's much more stable, that's for sure). I'm still testing it, but turning the router into an 802.11ac one seems to work. So basically I have a wifi6 router (on paper) that only works as wifi5. Still, it's slower than the router the ISP provided (an Arris modem+wifi router combo). Wonderful! However, I still have the wifi network dropouts now and then. I have "solved" this issue for the moment by plugging the router to the AC outlet via a radio remote controller (formely used to control some spotlights in the library). So when I don't see the router anymore in the network, I just press twice the radio remote (once for power off, second time to power it up) and wait for it to boot. Isn't that fantastic?
Oh, and BTW, about the buggy admin page GUI: did a little bit of debugging work, just for fun... There are plenty of Javascript bugs; also the CSS is very poorly written and buggy. Who wrote that piece of "code", Netgear? 🙂
I'm only keeping RAX120 on for now becasue I want to test it a bit more, but otherwise I'll have to return to the old one soon and forget about this... thing...
Re: RAX120 slowing down the AX connection to a few Mbps
Heya OP, just checking if you are still experiencing the this issue? I'm experiencing a the same issue with the RAX120 and a AX200 WiFi adapter. I haven't found any solution on the forum but I have seen other people reporting the same issue. However I haven't seen a concrete reply from Netgear or an actual solution to fix the problem. Thanks in advance for your reply!
