RAX50 vs XR1000 Speeds Limited

[Raab70]

I ordered an XR1000 from Amazon but they accidentally sent me an RAX50. As far as I can find they're the same router except the XR1000 has the DumaOS software. So here's the problem, after setting them both up the XR1000 is slow! So what am I missing in the configuration?

I'm testing with the two computers I use which is a MBP in the same room and a Windows 10 PC with a WIFI6 PCIe card through one wall. All speeds are using speedtest in Firefox.

 

RAX50: Setup was easy, speeds were <100Mbps (on pc one room over) before I enabled smart connect at which point I got about 500Mbps. Qos was left off. Speedtest on the MBP was 640Mbps, nice! I played one night of gaming (not a rigorous test) with no connection issues.

 

XR1000: Lots more setup to go through but pretty much all defaults, I enabled SmartConnect right away due to the last experience. Went to my PC one room over and immediately got 80Mbps. I played with a few settings like reducing the max 5Ghz speed to 1200Mbps and ensuring the PC was connected with 5Ghz, nothing really made a measurable difference. The link speed always says something around 200Mbps in Windows 10. Only other setting I think I changed was enabling MU-MIMO.

Then I turned off QoS, which should "only be done for testing" according to DumaOS. Speeds went up to almost 200Mbps. Speeds on the MBP in the same room as the XR1000 (with QoS off) are still under 200Mbps.

I did play some games but not for long as setup had taken hours. Connection was OK but there were 1 or 2 times where my ping spiked which never happened with the RAX50.

 

Note that the Connection Benchmark module in DumaOS confirmed I'm getting >700Mbps at the router.

What config am I missing? Why will the XR1000 not give me any speeds over 200Mbps? Even in the same room!

 

EDIT: I followed the DumaOS Optimal Settings Guide with no improvement. Congestion control was already disabled and I didn't update QoS priorities. IPv6 is disabled and no modem settings were changed.

[Netduma Fraser]

Welcome to the forum!

What is the model of the modem/router the XR is connected to? Are ALL devices connected to the XR? I'd recommend setting the 5GHz to the option above 1200Mbps as that should give you better results. Here are some suggestions:

• Use a WiFi analyzer to find the least congested channel and change to that
• Ensure it's in an elevated position - not on a metal surface
• Ensure there aren't any electrical / wireless devices e.g headphones etc within close proxity ~3 feet if possible
• Set the antennae to this position _ | | _

[Raab70]

Modem is Netgear CM1000. All devices are connected to the XR, all tests only ever had one router plugged in at a time. I actually factory reset the RAX50 before plugging the XR in.

• Changing the mode to "Up to 2400Mbps" removes the option for auto channel selection. I used the built-in MacOS wireless diagnostics scanner and there are no other 5GHz routers in range so I left channel at the default of 36.
• Router is on a particle board shelf about 3ft off the ground. Moved up one shelf (~4ft high now) to accommodate new antennae positioning. No metal around it besides the modem which is now one shelf below.
• No other wireless devices nearby. There is a Raspberry Pi next to it (wired connection running smokeping) which may still have wifi active, I unplugged it to be safe
• Antennae position changed.
• Full reboot performed (turn off modem and router, turn on modem and wait to stabilize, turn on router)
• Also swapped out the included thin cat5e cable that was connecting the router to the modem with another cat5e cable I had laying around that was shorter.

 

Result is... 432Mbps! Note that is actually with QoS enabled. Huge improvement and I'll keep testing and post some more results to determine which of these makes the biggest difference.

Testing with QoS disabled gives me a result of 493Mbps.

Note that all tests are on the MBP in the same room so still below the 600Mbps I got with the RAX50 but not too far off. I'll run some tests tonight on the PC

Any more suggestions appreciated!

 

EDIT: With some more testing and moving things around it seems that moving the shelf didn't make much of a difference. RPi was also returned without loss of speed. Channel 40 had similar speeds to 36. Seems like the biggest change came from changing the mode from 1200Mbps to 2400Mbps.

I tried changing from 2400->4800 (the last option available) which brought it back down to 80Mbps. Very odd. Put it back to 2400Mbps and first test is then 525Mbps down. Very odd.

[Netduma Fraser]

So the modes you're changing also affect the width options as well which is why it has an affect on speeds. I believe the 4800 mode is 160MHz which not a lot of devices support. Well done on getting the speeds up, I suspect the rest is due to DumaOS itself utilizing more resources than the standard firmware. You may receive a little more if you disable the protection option in WAN Settings as well.

[Raab70]

Checking the box for "Disable Port Scan and DoS Protection" in WAN Setup brought it up to about 529Mbps. Not a huge gain.

 

Makes a lot of sense the software has a lot more features on this router and all of the tests I ran with the RAX50 had QoS disabled so it's pretty impressive I can get this close in terms of speeds with that enabled within DumaOS.

[Netduma Fraser]

I would say that's probably the max you'll see then, if we think of any more things you could try to tweak it we will definitely let you know. Yes exactly, it's quite a lot more intensive than the standard interface, plus we also use the Netgear settings pages so a good result really.