Netgear Nighthawk M6 Pro Repeated Internet Failures

[SeniorWhiz]

Last September, I purchased a new Netgear Nighthawk M6 Pro 5G Hot Spot from AT&T.  I set it up in my home as the main source of internet and routing, including a WI-FI Hot Spot, and a source for Ethernet connections to other wired internet devices in my home via a 16 port Switch. All together, my home had anywhere from 16 to 20 devices supported by the Nighthawk, either by WI-FI connections or the Ethernet port.

Since the day of installation as the only router in my home, I experienced on going failures of the Nighthawk.

The internet connection was via a local cell tower in my area. Signal strength was always 4-5 bars of cell signal as indicated on the front panel of the Nighthawk. Signal strength was never a problem.

The failure mode was that somewhere between 6 to 24 hours after the last boot up of the Nighthawk, it would prevent any user or device on my home network to be able to load an HTML page from any website. The Nighthawk was still connected to the internet, as I could successfully ping any site in the world, or do a successful :NSLOOKUP for any server. It just couldn't load a web page, which made it useless for ALL users in my home/business. It's almost as though the Nighthawk had run out of memory and could only perform minimal network tasks.

The only way to fix it was to reboot the Nighthawk. That solved the problem temporarily... at least for the next 6-24 hours.

Since I purchased the device from AT&T, they were the primary support providers. I spent tens upon tens of hours with AT&T spread out for over a YEAR trying to get the problem fixed, to no avail. They even sent me two different Nighthawks trying to resolve the problem. With each new device, and a new sim card,  the Nighthawk still exhibited  the same identical failure mode. I became convinced that it wasn't a cell signal problem. It was a device problem.

Out of desperation, I called Netgear technical support and told them I would PAY for support on the Nighthawk.

They would have nothing to do with it. They claimed that it's an AT&T device and AT&T runs the cell network that the Nighthawk utilized.

I continually tried a wide variety  of experiments,  mostly in configuration changes and and connection methods to the home network. I'll shorten this by describing the one that finally worked.

Prior to going to the At&T home network solution with the Nighthawk, my ISP was a local "Canopy Network"

provider. In the use of that ISP, my home router was a Linksys EA8500 router. It is a MU-MIMO AC2600 Dual Band Router that I cannot say enough good things about. It's rock solid in all networking aspects and had a tremendous distance coverage for both WI-FI bands for all devices. It's a top notch router.

So the solution for the Nighthawk problems was to take away it's duties as a router and a WI-FI Service provider and utilize it strictly as an ISP access. In the Nighthawk, I turned off both WI-FI ports, and turned on the single Ethernet port. I ran an Ethernet cable from the Nighthawk  to the WAN port on the Linksys Router. The Linksys just saw the Nighthawk as an ISP provision.  I configured the Nighthawk with a local address of 192.168.0.1 and the Linksys local subnet with 192.168.1.1. Since the Nighthawk was connected to the WAN port, the Linksys did all the routing from my local network connected devices to the Nighthawk subnet and the internet. PRESTO! Problem Solved. My home network became rock solid in reliability and performance. I was getting full 5G performance to all my connected devices. The Linksys also provided dual band WI-FI throughout the home. I did not use any of the Nighthawk's WI-FI capabilities.

So the bottom line is that DO NOT USE THE Nighthawk as a router.

If you have only a very few devices connected to it, it *may*  work ok. But throwing a whole business and household device population at it just won't work.

Hopefully someday, Netgear will recognize the significance of this problem with the device and provide a solution for it. Even if they fixed it, I wouldn't change my current network back to using the Nighthawk as a router. The LInksys EA8500 does too good of a job in that role.

Device Info:

Netgear Nighthawk M6 Pro 5G Hot Spot/Router

Hardware version 1.0

Firmware Version NTGX65_10.04.22.01

Firmware Build Date: 2023/01/11

[JT240Z]

There is a more current firmware version from AT&T that may resolve some of your issues.  Try to do a software update and see if it comes down.  The problem you may experience is that AT&T is allocating downloads in small batches so not everyone is getting the update at the same time.  I've found that the device will say your software is up to date when it is in fact not.  Repeated attempts to obtain an update seems to eventually allow for the update to come down.  Unfortunately, Netgear cannot speed up the process since it's totally up to AT&T to deliver the goods.

[sjbender]

I had to do the same. I ended up buying a standalone router to handle all the device traffic and had a direct connection to the M6. That solved all my freeze up and overheat problems with the device.

[kzbrym]

I agree with what you described 100%, except mine was the M6 not the Pro.  I bought it a year ago for my mom who can not get normal highspeed internet, we had it for 3 years on the "older" Netgear product on 4G/WiFi5 and had zero issues. We upgraded to the M6 early last year through ATT and it has been a disaster every since. I had to put a smart plug on the device to reboot it every day, I had replaced it once through ATT, changed SIM card, did multiple factory resets as required by ATT, and a year later the same issues.  I agree your solution should work but I refuse to by a standalone switch and access point when this product should work for 1 person with ease.  This was working so bad and ATT would not do anything I decided to cancel my subscription and eat the cost of the M6 so my mom could have reliable interent, I am even paying twice the price for internet service but at least it works.  I also agree, it seems when you get 2 or 3 people on it at once, traffic stops passing, I can see multiple ping losses. I would think after a year Netgear/ATT would have fixed this but they have not and lost me as a customer. I hope the get this straightened out, what a disappointment this product was along with ATT support.

[kzbrym]

Firmware upgrades never fixed anything, I have the same problem, what a disappointment the M6 is.