NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Slow AX200 (WiFi 6) connection to RS500 - but with a partial solution
Thought I would share an issue I was running into with my RS500 on firmware 1.0.1.90 that caused me hours of searching trying to fix and how I was able to resolve the issue. Let me describe. My wife's computer is built around an itx board that has the WiFi from a little module attached to the motherboard (not a regular pcie slot, at least in the standard user sense). The WiFi chipset is Intel AX200 which is WiFi 6. The issue was that this wifi card was only connecting to the RS500 5 GHz channel at Wireless N (aka WiFi 4) speeds. By pulling up the Win 11 wifi info, that meant that it was theoretically capped at 300 Mbps but, by using speedtest, I was seeing real connections of something like 210 Mbps. That's just not good enough these days. I tried lots of the usual things like upgrading drivers, etc. and nothing made any difference... until I tried one tweak on the RS500. When I changed the top 5 GHz transfer speed on the RS500 from 5.8 Gbps down to 2.9 Gbps, voila! the AX200 chipset was connecting at full WiFi 6. The Win11 wifi diagnostics reports it as 817/432 (down/up) Mbps which is more what I would expect from that card. With Speedtest I'm seeing download rates in the 500+ Mbps range which is more in the ballpark of what I would expect. So it's a solution... kind of. The downside is my own desktop computer has a WiFi 7 card in it and, by making this tweak to the RS500 for my wife's computer, I'm not getting as fast of downloads as I did before the shift from 5.8 Gbps down to 2.9 Gbps. Honestly, it's probably chopping off 100-150 Mbps from my WiFi 7 download rate (was getting 750-800 Mbps before and now is more like 650 Mbps). For now, I'm ok with that sacrifice and resolving the slow connection rate for my wife's rig. I'm hoping that this is just some kind compatibility/handshaking issue between the RS500 and the Intel AX200 chipset that can be resolved by a firmware update at some point. Bottom line, AX200 with 5GHz channel set at 5.8 Gbps results in it falling back to some sort of compatibility connection at wireless N speeds. Set the RS500 to max out at 2.9 Gbps on the 5 GHz channel and the AX200 will connect at wireless AX (aka WiFi 6) speeds.