× Introducing the Orbi 970 Series Mesh System with WiFi 7 technology. For more information visit the NETGEAR Press Room.
Orbi WiFi 7 RBE973
Reply

Extenders LED lights are all green, but still no connection to the internet

Gustafsson
Follower

Extenders LED lights are all green, but still no connection to the internet

Hi.

 

First of all; this is concerning the EX6130 | AC1200 Dual Band Wifi Range Extender (Ext A) and the WN3100RP | Universal Pass Through Wifi Range Extender (Ext B). The option to list this in the dedicated field didn't show up when I wrote this submission. The router I'm using is the Nighthawk X6 R8000 and the house is connected with 100 GB fiber.

 

Situation: I have, for some time now, had two extenders connected to my router, one extender in the basement (Ext B), and the second on the second floor (Ext A). I've had these set up with different SSID's, mainly because I didn't know about the Smart Connect option and ability to, in a way, merge my wifi setup into one. Yesterday I decided to do just that and began the process described in Netgears own tutorials, but began by reseting the router and both extenders to factory settings, simply to start on a new slate and avoid possible errors. The router setup went smoothly and both the 2,4 GHz and 5 Ghz network are now using the same SSID. 

 

The extenders, however, are acting up. Both the setup of Ext A and B went as it should and they were working flawlessly. I noticed later that night though that Ext A was having trouble reaching the devices that were connected to it (device LED was jumping from solid red to green and the devices were buffering), even though they were used in the room next door, and by me right besides it. Judging by the solid green router LED it was connected, the power and WSP LED's were solid green aswell. I tried changing the channel on it but had to reset it again to access its settings. This time when I followed the same steps as before, the extender couldn't establish a connection to the router.

 

I redid the setup procedure today and this time it managed to connect to the router, after I turned of Ext B and noticed that it suddenly had a bad connection to the router (LED was solid red). During the continued setup process of Ext A the real problems started occuring. When first setting it up I kept the SSID's seperate and unique to be able to access the extenders settings more easily. I noticed last night that it had a firmware update available and thought that might've been the problem. (My MacBook pro happened to be connected to the disfunctional extender at the right time so that I was able to access the extenders settings and see the update, but before I got the chance to update its firmware the extender stopped working).

 

After I had completed the set up I tried to access the settings on mywifiext.net, but at this point my computer warned me that I had no wifi connection (wifi symbol was greyed out with an exclamation mark over it). This happened when trying both the 2,4 Ghz and 5 Ghz network. I tried renewing the DHCP Lease, which did nothing. I was able to redo the setup process several times, but the same problem occured. I also tried reseting it to factory settings one more time, and restarted my router, eventhough i realize that the problem aren't coming from there. When connected to the router's network the wifi works as it should.

 

I have now turned Ext A off aswell and are only using the router, which works fine in some areas of the house, but of course badly in the areas the extenders are supposed to cover. I tried using Ext B to check if the same problem had occured there, which it had, so I turned that of again and have been wanting to burn my house down ever since. Keep in mind that both extenders worked when I set them up yesterday, atleast the first minutes when I was testing them.

 

I have googled for answers since yesterday but no one seems to have the same problem so I'm hoping that there are some hero on this forum, preferably someone telling me I did one simple misstake which is easy to fix.

 

I'm sorry for the long text, but thanks for sticking with me. I thought you'd need the the whole story to help me.            

Message 1 of 2
plemans
Guru

Re: Extenders LED lights are all green, but still no connection to the internet

From the sounds of it all this happened because you enabled smart connect. Smart connect needs to work with compatible devices because it dynamically switches devices from one band to the next. Neither extender is compatible with this.  You're mixing new/old technologies. 

If you want/need the extenders, you're going to need to turn smart connect off and utilize unique ssid's for the router and extenders. Otherwise you'll keep running into the issues you're having. 

Message 2 of 2
Top Contributors
Discussion stats
  • 1 reply
  • 2956 views
  • 0 kudos
  • 2 in conversation
Announcements

Orbi WiFi 7