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Extremely slow speeds with A7000 Nighthawk usb adapter
Hello:
I am having a very frustrating time getting even borderline acceptable wifi speeds with my A7000 usb adapter. I have Windows 10 Pro, fully up to date and downloaded the latest drivers for the A7000. I have gigabit internet from Xfinity. My two cell phones are able to get the following speedtest.net results consistently: iphone 7 plus with iOS 12 gets 220-260 Mbps down and 40 Mbps up; razer phone 2 with android 8.1 gets 500-600 Mbps down and 40 Mbps up.
I have tried the Nighthawk on several computers in my house, but the main one I'm trying to improve is Windows 10 Pro, fully up to date OS and all drivers for the entire computer are fully updated. I get *if I'm lucky* 20 Mbps download. The strange part is I often see *upload* speeds in the 80-100 Mbps range on this computer. Makes no sense to me. I've done speed tests with other apps and sites, including speedof.me and they all are similarly poor. My router is not in a cabinet or behind a wall or anything. It is on a table in the same room as this computer, albeit about 20 feet away. For cabling purposes, it is not at all convenient to try to run an ethernet cable to this computer (or any other of my computers in the house). I have run all of the tests with my phones in the same exact place as the A7000 adapter to ensure the comparisons were valid. I enabled airplane mode and selectively turned on WiFi to run the tests - so there is zero chance that any cellular signal was impacting the results. The Razer phone doesn't even have a cell phone plan at all. I have looked at and tried all the relevant suggestions I saw in another thread here: https://kb.netgear.com/24903/ - they have had no effect.
I have verified the adapter is operating in 802.11 ac mode, and is connected to the 5 Ghz band of my router. Obviously from the cell phone tests, the router is definitely broadcasting in 802.11 ac, but I can't figure out why the A7000 isn't utilizing the connection correctly. I have tried a few of the adapter modes, but I'm not really that sure which one would be an improvement. None of those changes seem to have made any difference.
I also connected to my router config tool and tried to force it to be in 802.11 ac mode and that seems to be the case, but the connection with the A7000 hasn't changed.
I really need some help figuring this out - I can't believe my cell phones seem better optimized for wifi than my Windows 10 PC.
Re: Extremely slow speeds with A7000 Nighthawk usb adapter
I'm happy to report that I have finally got things working as they should have been all along. I haven't tested the wired connection, and probably won't at this point, but I was trying to retrace my steps to avoid having to wipe the system and start with a fresh install of Windows 10. I had forgotten about one change that I had tried early on in this troubleshooting - something that was suggested on several sites if you google "slow internet windows 10" or similar. That is, disabling windows auto-tuning. I had forgotten about that, and so today I set it back to normal and just like that the 150-160 Mbps download wall was gone - I'm getting 600+ Mbps downloads using the A7000.
I think I fell into the trap of installing things too quickly from the vendors of my PC components, without being suspicious enough about what these "tools" would be doing. I honestly did not determine exactly which program was causing my horrible initial experience of sub-20 Mbps speeds. That lead me down the road of trying any and all suggestions I found that claimed to be solutions to windows 10 internet speeds, and not keeping good track of what changes I had made.
I'm not really sure why so many people feel disabled the auto-tuning function will increase speeds - i literally found 10's of pages that all said to do this, and they all seemed sure it would only help, not hurt your performance. Clearly that isn't always the case.
Hopefully this information will be useful to someone else!
Re: Extremely slow speeds with A7000 Nighthawk usb adapter
Ok, I've done some more work on this and no longer believe the AC1900 has anything to do with my problem. I tried it on several other computers and made sure the driver was the latest and was able to get really nice speeds with it - up to 600 Mpbs downloads. But on the new PC that I built where I found this issue, I was still getting less than 20 Mpbs. I ended up hooking up directly to my router and had the same exact slow speeds as with wifi. I tested another PC in the same way and was able to get over 900 Mbps via ethernet.
I booted into safe mode with networking and was happy to see with the new PC I got just under 160 Mbps. Not nearly as fast as the other computer, but a huge improvement from before. So I went back to wifi, and just started deleting any programs that were just utilities or tools and things I didn't absolutely need. After doing that, and running speed tests after each one, I was able to match the 160 Mbps download speed using the A7000 via wifi.
So I'm still stumped. I'm happier than before, but I really should be getting 600-700 Mbps easily with this adapter and my network. The fact that I am hitting a wall at around 150-160 Mbps, in both wifi and ethernet, must mean there's something limiting my internet speed in Windows 10. I just can't for the life of me think what it could be. I recently had to replace the boot drive on another PC, and after a fresh install of windows 10 I just plugged in my netgear USB adapter (a much older one than the A7000) and everything worked fine. I tested that again today and was still getting about 125 Mbps download. I tested the A7000 there and immediately jumped up to about 240 Mbps. Awesome! But, why am I not getting that on my new PC???
I almost think that going with Windows 10 Pro may be the problem - there are a lot more settings in the adapter configuration and I have almost no idea what any of them mean or what they do. Is it possible that there's something defaulting to a setting that caps my network speeds?
I inspected the wifi settings and windows reports that it is a 1.3 Gbps speed. The signal strength is maxed out. It is operating in 802.11 ac mode on the 5 Ghz band. Everything that should be necessary to get maximum speed.
I've been scouring google trying to find a guide to this but everything i've tried has had no effect. I hope someone reads this that knows the answer, I would really appreciate it!
Re: Extremely slow speeds with A7000 Nighthawk usb adapter
I'm happy to report that I have finally got things working as they should have been all along. I haven't tested the wired connection, and probably won't at this point, but I was trying to retrace my steps to avoid having to wipe the system and start with a fresh install of Windows 10. I had forgotten about one change that I had tried early on in this troubleshooting - something that was suggested on several sites if you google "slow internet windows 10" or similar. That is, disabling windows auto-tuning. I had forgotten about that, and so today I set it back to normal and just like that the 150-160 Mbps download wall was gone - I'm getting 600+ Mbps downloads using the A7000.
I think I fell into the trap of installing things too quickly from the vendors of my PC components, without being suspicious enough about what these "tools" would be doing. I honestly did not determine exactly which program was causing my horrible initial experience of sub-20 Mbps speeds. That lead me down the road of trying any and all suggestions I found that claimed to be solutions to windows 10 internet speeds, and not keeping good track of what changes I had made.
I'm not really sure why so many people feel disabled the auto-tuning function will increase speeds - i literally found 10's of pages that all said to do this, and they all seemed sure it would only help, not hurt your performance. Clearly that isn't always the case.
Hopefully this information will be useful to someone else!
