Just bought my XR500, not bad but not as advertised.

[Ferjoz]

Hi,

I recently joined the XR500 family and so far I'm really happy with the capabilities of this device and its features (compared to many DLink, ASUS, CISCO and other high end routers).

But I have a couple of questions:

• When will the USB storage support proper exFAT and ext4 partitions?
• Why are the speeds so low even when there is only one user accessing the files? (usb 3.0 HDD, I've tested it higher connected directly to my computer) and I'm using Gigabit.
• 
• Why when I enable HT160 (Settings - Advanced Settings - Advanced Wireless) the router goes unusable, yellow lights everywhere, rebooting once it has booted up and such? I fixed by doing a factory reset but I'm never moving that setting again.
• Why is there a limit for only 4 devices on the Geo-Filter settings? I kinda purchased this model  expecting it to have support for more devices, is it the limit for that feature itself or just for my "mid-range" router?

Other than that, it's a really nice router, it even managed to connect my unstable chinese tablet that manages to crash whole WiFi networks when connecting to any other router (and doesn't even gets proper internet).

Best regards
Ferjoz

 

[Guest Killhippie]

6 hours ago, Ferjoz said:

Hi,

I recently joined the XR500 family and so far I'm really happy with the capabilities of this device and its features (compared to many DLink, ASUS, CISCO and other high end routers).

But I have a couple of questions:

• When will the USB storage support proper exFAT and ext4 partitions?
• Why are the speeds so low even when there is only one user accessing the files? (usb 3.0 HDD, I've tested it higher connected directly to my computer) and I'm using Gigabit.
• 
• Why when I enable HT160 (Settings - Advanced Settings - Advanced Wireless) the router goes unusable, yellow lights everywhere, rebooting once it has booted up and such? I fixed by doing a factory reset but I'm never moving that setting again.
• Why is there a limit for only 4 devices on the Geo-Filter settings? I kinda purchased this model  expecting it to have support for more devices, is it the limit for that feature itself or just for my "mid-range" router?

Other than that, it's a really nice router, it even managed to connect my unstable chinese tablet that manages to crash whole WiFi networks when connecting to any other router (and doesn't even gets proper internet).

Best regards
Ferjoz

 

Speeds are slow because the code running that (Netgears) is not up to date, Voxel who is on smallnetbuilder and has worked on the R7800 (this router is a R7800 with 128mb more flash memory and no esata, that's it)  apart from a aggressive gaming shell, so USB speeds are not that fast because the code wont be optimised by Netgear, but you are dealing with a 32 bit SoC  that will be 5 years old in January too...

 HT160 is best left off unless you have devices that can utilise it, same as using 40 Mhz bandwidth instead of leaving 20/40 coexistence ticked as per the Wi-Fi Alliance guidelines for 40 Mhz and 20 Mhz coexistence, as 2.4Ghz bandwidth is saturated and like HT160 can slow your network down by causing packet collision. AX routers wont have this issue with much greater speeds over 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz as long as you have the clients which are now  starting to hit the shelves. Wi-Fi 5 routers (802.11ac) will be outdated tech by mid 2020 as more manufacturers release AX gear.I'm sure Netduma and Netgear may possibly release a AX gaming router at some point but that's a guess.

 As to factory reset  Netgear routers do prefer them after a update, and don't use a backup from a previous firmware instead of manually entering the settings as it can bring with it low level changes that cause issues. As to Geo Filter, that may change with Duma OS 3.0 but that's Netduma's department, I'm guessing the OS and the router hardware on both XR500 and XR700 just cant deal with it possibly or its a code limitation, not sure tbh, but Fraser or one of the Netduma team will let you know.

[Netduma Fraser]

Hey, welcome to the forum and Happy Holidays!

Unfortunately I can really only answer your last question as the rest are quite Netgear specific and so would be better if you created a ticket with them here: http://support.netgear.com/
and they may be able to help further. Some good advice above though however.

4 devices is what the feature has always had available even on our first router, it's not that the feature or the router itself can only support 4 devices but rather it's something we've limited ourselves. There are a few reasons for this, one we really didn't expect anyone to have more than 4 gaming devices that would be using the Geo-Filter at once, is this the case for you? Also having more than 4 devices at once would make the map very cluttered and would be hard to tell which host is for which device. We do have some ideas and plans on how roadmap on how to counter act these rather than just increasing the limit. If you could let us know your usecase of why more than 4 would be helpful to you that would be great!

[Ferjoz]

20 hours ago, Killhippie said:

Speeds are slow because the code running that (Netgears) is not up to date, Voxel who is on smallnetbuilder and has worked on the R7800 (this router is a R7800 with 128mb more flash memory and no esata, that's it)  apart from a aggressive gaming shell, so USB speeds are not that fast because the code wont be optimised by Netgear, but you are dealing with a 32 bit SoC  that will be 5 years old in January too...

 HT160 is best left off unless you have devices that can utilise it, same as using 40 Mhz bandwidth instead of leaving 20/40 coexistence ticked as per the Wi-Fi Alliance guidelines for 40 Mhz and 20 Mhz coexistence, as 2.4Ghz bandwidth is saturated and like HT160 can slow your network down by causing packet collision. AX routers wont have this issue with much greater speeds over 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz as long as you have the clients which are now  starting to hit the shelves. Wi-Fi 5 routers (802.11ac) will be outdated tech by mid 2020 as more manufacturers release AX gear.I'm sure Netduma and Netgear may possibly release a AX gaming router at some point but that's a guess.

 As to factory reset  Netgear routers do prefer them after a update, and don't use a backup from a previous firmware instead of manually entering the settings as it can bring with it low level changes that cause issues. As to Geo Filter, that may change with Duma OS 3.0 but that's Netduma's department, I'm guessing the OS and the router hardware on both XR500 and XR700 just cant deal with it possibly or its a code limitation, not sure tbh, but Fraser or one of the Netduma team will let you know.

thanks for your reply Killhippie, I didn't know the hardware on this router was that old, yikes!

I was expecting faster speeds because I saw a review on some website, and the USB test showed it can reach over 100 MB/s, I guess it was before DumaOS.

I was kinda aware of the 20/40 Mhz collision when I saw the 5G networks have the same 40/80 Mhz stuff, I'll keep that in mind.

The factory reset was only done when I tested the feature that bugged out the router, but I'll keep that in mind on future updates.

15 hours ago, Netduma Fraser said:

Hey, welcome to the forum and Happy Holidays!

Unfortunately I can really only answer your last question as the rest are quite Netgear specific and so would be better if you created a ticket with them here: http://support.netgear.com/
and they may be able to help further. Some good advice above though however.

4 devices is what the feature has always had available even on our first router, it's not that the feature or the router itself can only support 4 devices but rather it's something we've limited ourselves. There are a few reasons for this, one we really didn't expect anyone to have more than 4 gaming devices that would be using the Geo-Filter at once, is this the case for you? Also having more than 4 devices at once would make the map very cluttered and would be hard to tell which host is for which device. We do have some ideas and plans on how roadmap on how to counter act these rather than just increasing the limit. If you could let us know your usecase of why more than 4 would be helpful to you that would be great!

Sounds fair enough, I've kinda seen how the ping stuff on the Geo-filter works, and it can overwhelm some people (lots of data).

Truth be told, I bought this router to manage the mess we have in our apartment ; my GF plays on Xbox mostly, I play on PC (mostly battle royale games) and we have another 4  people playing on PS4, Switch and 2 other Laptops (mostly league of legends and CSGO ). We've had issues handling all the devices at once before, but this router has most of our necessities covered up. So, maybe I'm just a 1% scenario really.

thanks for your reply Netduma Fraser.

PS: do you recommend getting into Beta testing new firmwares? I ask because I see support for a good bunch of games, but some are missing (Heroes of the Storm, Apex Legends, etc. (I'm hoping they're covered by the "DumaOS Classified Games" in the traffic prioritization section.

[Netduma Fraser]

Ah interesting okay, well thank you for your usecase, at least we know there is a demand for it. Our particular ideas around this may not be implemented immediately but it is something we'd like to address in some unique ways. If you have the option to beta test a firmware I would suggest it usually but due to the fact you have so many people in one home an interuption to the router which is possible when testing could cause a lot of frustration for others.