Model RAX80 - Firmware - 1.0.1.60 Purchased August 2,2019
I bought this router a few weeks ago and noticed that I wasnt getting the speeds. This morning I had our ISP out to the house to confirm that I was getting 1GB to the house. ISP equipment show speed to house as 1GB. ISP laptop plugged directly to laptop shows 933. ISP plugged ethernet cable into router - speed dropped to 433. Ran tests using Ethernet directly to my laptop - got 966. Ran test after plugging in to the router - 233. Ran test using Netgear admin function - 233. Problem is definitely the router. Very surprised with this type of performance with Netgear. Expected better. So I understand that I have to turn off the radios, reboot the router, then turn them back on to get the true speed?
A couple things you can try from my experience with the RAX200 and reduced speed with gigabit connecting. I've done troubleshooting with netgear's firmware team because I had similar issues. Some of the firmwares worked, others slowed it down.
With these new devices, anytime you upgrade the firmware, make sure to do it over a hardwired connection and reset afterward. Most devices don't require the reset afterward but I had better luck when I did with the RAX devices.
1. Try enabling qos and setting your speed manually to the correct speed. I've had it work and even once I disabled qos, still work. Not sure why.
2. If you have ivp6 enabled, disable it. If its disabled try enabling it.
3. If you've reset it and ran it with stock settings, do you get the same speeds?
I would also open a support ticket. You get 90 days of free support through netgear. It gets more people aware of the issue. to do that go to the top and click on mynetgear. register an account and your device. From there you can access the support option.
1. whenever I was testing from within the nighthawk app, it hit full speed. But directly from computer, it wouldn't
2. Some of it is computer related. I know you said the tech's laptop couldn't hit full gigabit connection but make sure whatever you're testing with can. Hook it directly to the modem and see what the max speed is for that device so you have a baseline of what to shoot for.
Testing from the Nighthawk app - max speed hit - 533. Testing with Ethernet cable direct from PC to RAX80 - 541. Set and reset the QOS - no change. Disabled Ipv6 - no change. Rebooted rputer - same results. There is no modem attached - cable comes direct from outside to the router. Tested wireless connection from laptop - speed drops to max 334. Tested wireless speed from cellphone running same speedtest program thru firefox - 328. At least there is consistency as I would expect around 300 using wifi for a 500mb line. It seems obvious that the RAX80 is somehow only allowing a ma speed of around 500mb. The only times weve got the higher speeds (933) is when attached directly to the outside bypassing the router.
Still working with support on this issue. Have tried everything - firmware updates, resetting ruter, changing parameters, still only getting max 500MB speed on download and 50upload. I dont know if the router is the problem or my PC. Is it possible that the PC can onl handle up to 500MB speeds on the internal network cards? (HP SPectre HP Spectre x360 Convertible 15-bl1XX runing windows 10. Curret firmware level is now 1.0.1.64 2.1.46.1
Regarding the modem - I dont have a modem. The RAX is directly connected to the internet cable coming in from the ISP. Do I really eed a modem? WHen the ISP tested using his PC he received a speed reading of 933 without using a modem and his PC was much older than mine.
Thanks. Haent heard from them in a few days now. Funny how their "experts" are giving me changes to values in the parameters that dont even exist.......
- With Nighthawk app I could see Router receiving 900+ mbps
- Ethernet from router to my laptop was 850+ mpbs
- 5G signal was between 250 - 350 mpbs
- 2.4 signal was between 7 - 32 mpbs (SLOW)
- Firmware version V1.0,1,70_1.0.30
Customer service had me change the channels for the 2.4 (5G was slow before and changing the channel sped that up). All the other settings were set correctly.
Nothing we did made the 2.4 any faster. Oddly, the 2.4 signal did not decrease when I went into other rooms in the house.
The 5.0 signal is pretty good anywhere in the house, so I guess I could put all my devices to the 5, but some of my devices need the 2.4.
Anyhow, the router is less than a month old, so they recommend exchanging it.
Disappointed that I have to pay extra if I wanted the new router before returning the old one. The free support allows them to ship a new one only when they get the old one (which is NOT what customer service told me when I agreed to return the old one).
So needless to say, i am a bit disappointed with their customer service. I bought an expensive router so I hopefully wouldn't have these issue. And on top of that, being asked to pay to return their defective product doesn't sit well with me.
I was very excited about this router, but will probably end up returning it and get the damn modem/router direclty from Comcast, which they only rent.
I just got my internet service upgraded to a Gig. The speedtest on my provider's box shows
just under a Gig most all the time. The RAX80 is connected directly to this box and the speed test on it shows a little less than the provider box does.
Here's where it hurts. In back of the RAX80, I have a CAT6 network put into the house when it was built. Running the Speedtest on any (Wired) device on my network seems to top out at HALF a gig. - I am currently testing to see if this is a network problem or something with the RAX80. So far none of my experimental changes to the network hardware or cables hasn't made any change. - The next step will be to take the RAX80 out of the equation and see it that makes a change.
My older Lenovo laptop was getting less than half a gig when hard wired to the router. My newer laptop gets the 850+ when hard wired to the router. So in my case, I became less concerned about the direct connection causing my terrible 2.4 Ghz signal.
How are are your 5 Ghz and 2.4 Ghz signals?
Also, I was able to get Costco to exchange the router, it should come in a few days. I'll provide an update once I get that set up, to see if it's any better.
My Lenovo ThinkPad X1-2 does better on wi-fi than it does wired. Wired, I get approximately 500 Mbs, while on (CAT-6) copper it only gets about 350-380 Mbs. It does have a 1 Gb NIC built in, which means these figures are standing on their heads, although the Wifi-5 speed is more nearly what it should be than the wired speed is. I have a regular (Intel) desktop machine which gets similar low performance.
Today, time permitting, I'm going to move the router to another location and see if the speeds change. - The only way to be certain it's the RAX80 or not is to identify where the bottleneck is.
Netgear has been known for making quality network devices for quite while now. Their hardware is normally very good; this is especially true for the higher-level models. My misgivings are mainly over the use of Open-Source firmware running on a small version of Linux. Sure, it's cheaper, but there's no one-size-fits-all solution that's going to be best-suited to a specific router. While there may be rough spots in that more-or-less generic code, the devil in the details lie in the specific hardware-level device drivers. A lot of the reliability and performance is relies on the device-specific drivers and the microcode beneath it. - If the problem isn't in the hardware itself, it is in the software layers above; and especially in the interractions between the layers.
I've done a lot of development and beta testing over the years, but I didn't know I was buying into a deployment scheme that was launched to early and should still be in the development stage.
If they can't get this thing running reliably and as fast as advertised, I'm going to ask for my money back.
Thanks for the detailed reply! That helps me know a bit more of what's going on and how all these pieces fit together.
With my issue, they did have me install 2 different firmware versions. The second version helped my 5 GHz speed, but did little or worse to the 2.4 Ghz (I can't recall all the exact 2.4 speeds before and after the firmware changes).
The speed INTO the router seems fine, it's all the different speeds coming OUT, like ethernet, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz that I can't resolve. My ethernet and 5 GHz are fine, but the 2.4 GHz won't get past 30 mpbs on any device.
If you do end up returning this one, please let me know what you get? As I am not incredibly confident my replacement router will be any better. 😞
Having nearly the same issue with a RAX75 I got from Costco (supposedly it's exactly the same as the RAX80 without 1024 QAM on 2.4ghz). Was wondering why HBO GO would constantly error out, and sometimes even Google search pages wouldn't load the first time.
Hopefully the next firmware version is coming out soon, otherwise I'll probably just end up returning it to Costco. Seems I'm not having much luck with Netgear routers lately.
Dumb question, what did you mean by "(supposedly it's exactly the same as the RAX80 without 1024 QAM on 2.4ghz)." Is the router Costco sells different than normal RAX80s?
I can no longer change the channel that my 2.4 GHz runs on. I was asked to change to a "non overlapping" channel, and my speeds are still around 15 mpbs. And like you, I have devices that won't work becuase the speed is so slow it either won't open of won't recognize that it has an internet connection.
Very frustrating for such an expensive device.
I even moved almost all my devices, like Google minis, to the 5 GHz and didn't make any difference to the 2.4 speed.
On a good note, Costco is going to exchange mine, I have a new one coming this week, and I will return the defective one. And Costco will cover all shipping.
It's the Costco specific model of the RAX80, more of a way to prevent price matching really. Since it lacks 1024 QAM on the 2.4ghz band, speeds are reduced from 1148Mbps to 920Mbps.
Previously in this thread, I complained that the output through the 4 Gigabit ports on the back of the router were less than half of the slightly under Gig throughput coming in from my Internet provider, according to the Speedtest built into the RAX80's QOS settings page.
I made a technical service request about this yesterday, 1/29/2020, and the tech did a remote to my system and resolved the problem. he reset the MTU size setting back to its default, 1500. (Advanced>setup>WAN) This setting is usually not changed, but a previous technical support call had me change it to see it fixed a differen problem I was having. - Now the LAN speedtest benchmark is nearly as fast as the internet is, which is what I expected when I bought it last month. As for the other problem I was having? I don't know if it will reoccur. There wasn't sufficient time to see if the lower MTU setting actually fixed the earlier problem.
Bottom line: I anyone out there is having a problem with the (wired) LAN throughput from the RAX80,it would be useful to check your MTU to see if it's set to 1500. - If you still have a problem, you may want to look at your patch cable. CAT-5 will not carry Gigabit dataflow. For that you should be using CAT-6 cable, or Cat5e at minimum.
Hope this post helps resolve your throughput issue. If not, please leave a comment and then call Netgear Tech Support...
The 'success' I reported was short lived. The 'fix' that support had done by resetting MTU and restarting may have more due to the restart than the change to MTU. Today, the problem was back to (SNAFU) normal again. The 1Gb internet service gets into the RAX80, but less than half of that comes out of the four Gig ports on the back.
Again, I asked for a router that actually works as advertised or my money back.
I called my Netgear (paid) support and the got onto my local system and they reset it to defaults to see if that would change anything.
It didn't.
Again, I asked for a router that actually works as advertised or my money back.
They also couldn't get my base LAN IP back again, (192.168.0.1.) The only address range that it would allow is the 10.0.0.xx range which would be more than problematic here. I finally turned the box off and did a hard reset. I now have my proper LAN address range back again.
The slow problem still exists. The tech said that a Senior-Senior tech support person would call me tomorrow. If the problem is not resolved, I will demand a router that actually works as advertised or a full refund.
The 'success' I reported was short lived. The 'fix' that support had done by resetting MTU and restarting may have more due to the restart than the change to MTU. Today, the problem was back to (SNAFU) normal again. The 1Gb internet service gets into the RAX80, but less than half of that comes out of the four Gig ports on the back.
Again, I asked for a router that actually works as advertised or my money back.
I called my Netgear (paid) support and the got onto my local system and they reset it to defaults to see if that would change anything.
It didn't.
Again, I asked for a router that actually works as advertised or my money back.
They also couldn't get my base LAN IP back again, (192.168.0.1.) The only address range that it would allow is the 10.0.0.xx range which would be more than problematic here. I finally turned the box off and did a hard reset. I now have my proper LAN address range back again.
The slow problem still exists. The tech said that a Senior-Senior tech support person would call me tomorrow. If the problem is not resolved, I will demand a router that actually works as advertised or a full refund.
Try to Enable QoS then wait a minute and Disable QoS... in past I had to do that to get full 940Mbps on Ethernet.
On latest firmware though the QoS trick does not work for me anymore. I can only get 940Mbps now by Enable QoS and leaving it enabled. If I turn it off I get speed cut.
I have my QoS set to 1000 Down / 100 Up currently and getting 500Mbps on WiFi and 940 on Ethernet.
