Nighthawk X6s Extender EX8000 losing connection while under heavy load?

[OwenH]

This is a long one so I apologies in advance!

This is being used in a home environment on windows machines.

So I am using the model above on the firmware V1.0.1.240 set up as a mesh extender, and have a wired connection into my PC (PC One). The extender is about 10 meters from the router.

When idle, or under light traffic (web browsing, youtube etc.) there are no issues. The connection is very stable and I am able to ping any website repeatedly. All the lights are white including the connection light. The problem starts when heavy traffic is being sent/received from the machine.

When downloading big files or playing online games, my connection will suddenly drop and I'll have no internet on PC one. I checked the packets via Wireshark and I can see my network card asking for who has the IP address of my router. Rebooting the machine, resetting the network adapter or rebooting the extender fix this but only temporarily. It can also be fixed by re-plugging the ethernet cable. Again, there are no warning or error lights on the extender when this happens.

I have connected another machine (PC two) with an ethernet cable to see if the connection is down but it isn't. I can connect with PC two via the extender with no issues at all, while my original PC is erroring with a 'no default gateway' message and trying to find the IP of my router. However, if I download a large file on PC two and the same thing happens to it until I reboot, reset network adapter or reboot the extender.

To me, this rules out that it is an issue with PC one and to verify that, I purchased a PCIe Network card just in case the built in one was faulty, but the same thing happens

I have looked everywhere for a solution but cannot find anything and my knowledge of networking is limited so I am running out of ideas on how to fix this. What really confuses me is that when PC one thinks there is no connection, PC two is having no issues what so ever.

Any advice or suggestion would be welcomed with open arms!

Thank you!

[plemans]

Try rerunning the setup assistant on the extender. during setup, make sure to uncheck the "extend 2.4ghz network" option. 

You'll still be able to use it but it won't use it as failover for the backhaul if the 5ghz goes down.