RAX40 - extremely bad wifi speed

[edinho10]

I live in a four story house, where the modem is in the basement connected to a given router from the internet supplier. The house is setup so that all internet wall plugs in different rooms in the house is coming from the router in the basement. Because of this we need a external router to supply the wifi to the upper house and my father bought a rax40 a year ago so the wifi coverage would be better at the top and in the garden... 

So I have two wifis in the house and when I am testing the internet speed down in the basement on the given router from the internet supplier I get 500/500 mbps which is what I pay for. Then when I have the RAX40 directly into the given router with a CAT5e cabel and I only get 60 mbps. Both tested on 5 Ghz network.  
I tested with an older netgear router WNDR3700 and I instantly got 200/200 mbps in AP mode. So the issue has to be with rax40, does anyone have any suggestions why this might be?

RAX40 FW : V1.0.4.102_1.0.1 

Both are set to the same channels - Have tried both on same channel (basement is default at 100 and rax40 at 44)

Smart wifi settings : on

Traffic meter : off

QoS : off 

WMM - on

mtu : 1500

Have also tried setting the rax40 into AP mode and also tried turning off ax, but did not help anything. 

[plemans · Accepted solution]

if you're testing them both in the basement and getting full speed and the only thing that changes is the cable when you move it, then i'd be checking into a new cable. 

you can check your wan port connection speed. 

https://kb.netgear.com/24222/How-do-I-display-Internet-port-statistics-on-my-Nighthawk-router

[plemans]

A couple things. 

1. The RAX should be in ap mode. this prevents a double nat. Won't help with speed but helps with dhcp/nat issues. 

2. The RAX and the basement router should be on seperate channels. This prevents interference with each other

3. Did you disable smart connect so you can test both the 2.4ghz and the 5ghz seperate? 

4. Try a factory reset on the RAX. It had a lot of firmware changes. Factory resetting could remove/fix an issue that the updates might have caused. So start fresh. do the reset and during the install process, set it up in access point mode on seperate channels. 

[edinho10]

Thanks, 

I factory reseted both the basement router and rax40 and set it into AP mode. Testing in the basement I get 500/500 mbps from both routers. With a wifi explorer app I can tell that in the basement the routers dont get disturbed by neighbours. Then when I bring the rax40 up to the living room I only get 50/90 mbps. Both cabels tested with are cat5e, the cabel in the living room is a few months old.

Looking at the wifi explorer I see many neigbhours, but only one on the same channel. I have tried changing channels from 38 to 48 without any luck.  Could this maybe be an issue or could it be something else? Any suggestions what I could try now?

[edinho10]

Not sure if the photo was uploaded but can write it manually. Photo dump from wifi explorer regarding the my neighbours network on 5 Ghz:

Wifi - Channel - Channel width - Band - Mode - Generation - Max rate

Mine          - 40 - 80 Mhz - 5 GHz - a/n/ac/ax - 6 - 1201 Mbps

Basement  - 40 - 80 Mhz - 5 GHz - a/n/ac     - 5- 1201 Mbps

Neibhour 2 - 40 - 80 Mhz - 5 GHz - a/n/ac     - 5 - 1201 Mbps

Neibhour 3 - 40 - 80 Mhz - 5 GHz - a/n/ac     - 5 - 1201 Mbps

Neibhour 4 - 40 - 80 Mhz - 5 GHz - a/n/ac     - 5 - 1201 Mbps

Neibhour 5 - 40 - 40 Mhz - 5 GHz - a/n/ac     - 5 - 1201 Mbps

[plemans · Accepted solution]

if you're testing them both in the basement and getting full speed and the only thing that changes is the cable when you move it, then i'd be checking into a new cable. 

you can check your wan port connection speed. 

https://kb.netgear.com/24222/How-do-I-display-Internet-port-statistics-on-my-Nighthawk-router

[edinho10]

Thank you, both cabels was labeled with cat 5e so I though the router was getting the same. By checking the wan I saw that down in the basement I had 1G into the wan but in the living room I only had 100M.

Will have to get a new cabel, thanks for the help mate

[plemans]

You also might just check the ends. i've seen bad ends/crimps on cat 5e cables cause issues. If the wire is pulled through the wall/floor/ceiling, sometimes thats a simple fix for it.