POOR XR500 WIFI RANGE

[AzeRuS94]

Today has arrived my xr500, I went from the netduma r1 to the xr500, I have 300/300mb and the main goal of this upgrade was for improve wifi range and also my gaming experience. My current setup is isp router---xr500- ALL DEVICES, I live in a 2 floors house being the xr500 placed at my gaming room which is located at one end of the house, before the xr500, the netduma was able to provide wifi to all the rooms except one which is located upstairs straight to the opposite end of the house, being the only solution plug an extender for just that room, but now with the xr500 all the rooms in the second floor struggles to get speeds over 25mb/25mb. What can I do? And also which are the best settings for the xr500 in general for improve wireless experience? 

[Netduma Fraser]

Firstly have you arranged the antennas so they're optimally positioned to point to all areas of the home?

Are you using smart connect? If so disable that and use the 2.4 & 5GHz separately, 2.4GHz should have deep penetration of walls and should get you more range.

[AzeRuS94]

42 minutes ago, Netduma Fraser said:

Firstly have you arranged the antennas so they're optimally positioned to point to all areas of the home?

Are you using smart connect? If so disable that and use the 2.4 & 5GHz separately, 2.4GHz should have deep penetration of walls and should get you more range.

I don't know how to know if they are good fitted but yes I arranged as the picture of the xr500 guide said, I'm not using smart connect, every device located upstairs is on 2.4ghz with the less congested channel choosed and all the devices near the router on 5ghz.

[Netduma Fraser]

What are the QoS settings you're using? If you disable QoS completely in Anti-Bufferbloat options do you get higher speeds?

[AzeRuS94]

9 hours ago, Netduma Fraser said:

What are the QoS settings you're using? If you disable QoS completely in Anti-Bufferbloat options do you get higher speeds?

70/70 when high traffic priorization, the problem is when I'm connected through wifi, wired I get 300/300 doing a speedtest.

[Guest Killhippie]

Did you change any of the wifi settings like WMM or turn on HT160 by any chance? I tend to find leaving 2.4ghz on automatic actually works best for me the router is good at finding the least congestied channel on its own. Maybe try turning off beamforming, HT160 (default is off) and MU-MIMO to see if that helps.As to aerial configuration it varies but not by much, I found 25 degress for the two side antenna and vertical for the center ones gave me the best performance. Experiment with aerial positioning but don't stick the side antenna at 45 degrees that's way to much. Imagine a doughnut from the tip of each aerial, that's how the signal is transmitted, also make sure the router is set up in a high position and away from walls or metal objects and points of electrical interference. My XR500 picks tansmits 2.4Ghz halfway down my road so I had to dial back the TX rate. 5ghz covers my entire bungalow quite happily and thats the least powerful signal. Also if you had a firmware update at set up maybe a factory reset would have been advisable before setting the router up, oddly enough that can help as Netgear routers can be very quirky as hell after a firmware update. :)

[AzeRuS94]

2 hours ago, Killhippie said:

Did you change any of the wifi settings like WMM or turn on HT160 by any chance? I tend to find leaving 2.4ghz on automatic actually works best for me the router is good at finding the least congestied channel on its own. Maybe try turning off beamforming, HT160 (default is off) and MU-MIMO to see if that helps.As to aerial configuration it varies but not by much, I found 25 degress for the two side antenna and vertical for the center ones gave me the best performance. Experiment with aerial positioning but don't stick the side antenna at 45 degrees that's way to much. Imagine a doughnut from the tip of each aerial, that's how the signal is transmitted, also make sure the router is set up in a high position and away from walls or metal objects and points of electrical interference. My XR500 picks tansmits 2.4Ghz halfway down my road so I had to dial back the TX rate. 5ghz covers my entire bungalow quite happily and thats the least powerful signal. Also if you had a firmware update at set up maybe a factory reset would have been advisable before setting the router up, oddly enough that can help as Netgear routers can be very quirky as hell after a firmware update.

Still having poor range, what can I do??

[Newfie]

You mentioned an extender, are you still using this ?

double check you have connected the aerials correctly, they are labelled for each slot. No idea what happens if they are connected to the wrong slots to be honest.

I had to move my router to a central location to gain the best Wi-Fi, like you my old setup was one end of the house. I’ve also added an extender to reach outside and to be honest my old Apple TC had about the same Wi-Fi coverage. 

I use an app called Wi-fi SweetSpots and worked out where I was struggling but moving the router central has helped greatly.

 

 

[AzeRuS94]

58 minutes ago, Newfie said:

You mentioned an extender, are you still using this ?

double check you have connected the aerials correctly, they are labelled for each slot. No idea what happens if they are connected to the wrong slots to be honest.

I had to move my router to a central location to gain the best Wi-Fi, like you my old setup was one end of the house. I’ve also added an extender to reach outside and to be honest my old Apple TC had about the same Wi-Fi coverage. 

I use an app called Wi-fi SweetSpots and worked out where I was struggling but moving the router central has helped greatly.

 

 

Yes, I am using the extender for the room upstairs which is a dead zone, I can`t move the router because the optical rosette is placed at my gaming room. The aerials are in the right slot but how do I know if they are correctly fitted and working??

[Newfie]

I just screwed mine in to a finger tight setting. 

this may sound odd but are you connecting to the extender and what extender are you using?

Are you sure you are connecting to the 500 and not the extender?

How are you testing the speed when you get poor results?

 

 

[AzeRuS94]

2 hours ago, Newfie said:

I just screwed mine in to a finger tight setting. 

this may sound odd but are you connecting to the extender and what extender are you using?

Are you sure you are connecting to the 500 and not the extender?

How are you testing the speed when you get poor results?

 

 

Im connected to the xr500 2.4ghz through the devices that are upstairs, via speedtest, the extender is used just for one device in one room upstairs, the extender TL-WA850RE

[AzeRuS94]

21 hours ago, Netduma Fraser said:

What are the QoS settings you're using? If you disable QoS completely in Anti-Bufferbloat options do you get higher speeds?

What can I do?

 

[Newfie]

did you disable the QoS as Fraser suggested?

Are you using the Speedtest app. I find it all over the place, if I try their web one it gives me the results I should get but for some reason the app on my iOS is just not right.

[AzeRuS94]

6 hours ago, Newfie said:

did you disable the QoS as Fraser suggested?

Are you using the Speedtest app. I find it all over the place, if I try their web one it gives me the results I should get but for some reason the app on my iOS is just not right.

qos is disabled and I'm using speedtest from chrome as pc view

[Newfie]

I don’t know what else to suggest if you can’t move your router. My 500 is on par with my Apple router with regards to coverage and like you I had mine one side of the house so I moved the router central.

if your router is tucked away behind stuff it will suffer.

I use the one name function and no problems along with the EX8000 extender to push it down the garden. Perhaps it’s interference that’s playing you about but maybe you could try positioning your extender closer as an experiment and see what happens. 

Have to say I’m happy with the EX8000 extender, works a treat and my speeds stay great when I’m connected to that. 

[AzeRuS94]

12 hours ago, Newfie said:

I don’t know what else to suggest if you can’t move your router. My 500 is on par with my Apple router with regards to coverage and like you I had mine one side of the house so I moved the router central.

if your router is tucked away behind stuff it will suffer.

I use the one name function and no problems along with the EX8000 extender to push it down the garden. Perhaps it’s interference that’s playing you about but maybe you could try positioning your extender closer as an experiment and see what happens. 

Have to say I’m happy with the EX8000 extender, works a treat and my speeds stay great when I’m connected to that. 

I will probably do a refund on amazon for the router as it not helped me with wifi range at all and for what I see there is no solution.

[Newfie]

That’s a shame, to be honest I doubt there’s much out there that offers better coverage. You could try an exchange as it might be faulty and try another and see if that helps. 

[Netduma Alex]

As @Newfie suggested, download a Wifi Analyzer app and see which channels are busy. It might be that the channel you're using is particularly congested.

[AzeRuS94]

1 hour ago, Netduma Alex said:

As @Newfie suggested, download a Wifi Analyzer app and see which channels are busy. It might be that the channel you're using is particularly congested.

I already switched the channel to the best one, but it not seems to improve nothing.

[AzeRuS94]

1 hour ago, Netduma Alex said:

As @Newfie suggested, download a Wifi Analyzer app and see which channels are busy. It might be that the channel you're using is particularly congested.

I was doing a lot of tests with the app wifi sweetspots that newfie suggested me and I saw that 5ghz give me a lot faster speeds but with less range through all the house and 2.4ghz a lot more range but speeds are slower. Which one should I choose? 

[Netduma Alex]

2 hours ago, RehivaE said:

I was doing a lot of tests with the app wifi sweetspots that newfie suggested me and I saw that 5ghz give me a lot faster speeds but with less range through all the house and 2.4ghz a lot more range but speeds are slower. Which one should I choose? 

Well there's no right answer to that. I can tell you my personal view on it though.

I like to connect everything important via Ethernet and just use 2.4GHz for everything wireless. I would never do anything like gaming over wireless so having the slightly slower speeds doesn't bother me. The increased reach of 2.4GHz is worth it for me.

Of course you could just turn off Smart Connect and decide on a per-device basis.

[Newfie]

18 hours ago, RehivaE said:

I was doing a lot of tests with the app wifi sweetspots that newfie suggested me and I saw that 5ghz give me a lot faster speeds but with less range through all the house and 2.4ghz a lot more range but speeds are slower. Which one should I choose? 

I’m glad the app helped, it helped me map my house to see see what was going on.

like Alex I have my PS4 connected via Ethernet and then just have my other stuff like my MacBook, echos and iPads on Wi-Fi. I have to have smart connect on as I’m using the Netgear extender as a mesh system and if I turn it off I lose the back channel and the roaming feature. With the Apple router and Apple extender I use to have to switch channel. The draw back is Apple devices don’t just swap to the nearest point, they need to hit a set point before it switches to an AP point.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT203068

I used Apples Airport Utility on my iPad to then see where it would swap as the scan shows a signal strength. 

The extender I use is this one. I picked it as it has a usb as I use that for a printer when I need it.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/NETGEAR-EX8000-100EUS-Nighthawk-Tri-Band-FastLane3/dp/B0756NR1C4

So far it’s been good, but it’s worth noting that anything connected to the extender can’t be controlled in the Duma software like  Individual devices that connect directly to the router but it’s not an issue for me.

 

[Netduma Alex]

Well I suppose if all of the devices on the extender are categorised as "not gaming devices" that makes it workable.

[AzeRuS94]

6 hours ago, Netduma Alex said:

Well I suppose if all of the devices on the extender are categorised as "not gaming devices" that makes it workable.

I don't know what happened but right now the wifi of the xr500 doesn`t work, either 2.4ghz and 5ghz but I have internet through wired, also the led of 2.4ghz and 5ghz are off, I rebooted the router but nothing.

[Netduma Alex]

Is wifi definitely still switched on under Settings > Advanced Settings > Advanced Wireless?