Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2020 20:52 Post subject: R9000 Not doing the trick for major signal issues in house
Got an R9000 a few years ago to combat some poor signal issues and for the first few months it was great. It seemed to have conquered our signal issues, wifi was strong, and everyone could download fast.
Over a few months it degraded back to what it was before I bought the R9000.
Since then the router has also been moved upstairs where it isn't far from a laundry chute which I know causes major interference.
I've tried multiple channels on both 5 ghz and 2.4 and nothing seems to improve stability.
We have a 2 story house with a lot of bedrooms, a good amount of mirrors, a laundry chute near where the router currently resides (because I WFH and need a hard wired connection) and signal issues are horrendous at the house.
Should I try DD-WRT firmware? Ubiquiti AP? At my wit's end.
Joined: 16 Nov 2015 Posts: 6446 Location: UK, London, just across the river..
Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2020 23:47 Post subject:
bad wi-fi settings, bad router placement, will not be improved with DDWRT firmware...installation...
it wont hurt to try... in general those units must have a fair range...I usually use a WAP's with power-line adaptors to improve wi-fi coverage.. https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_access_point
I use 3 R9000's spread through the house and hardwired to provide coverage and redundancy during maint and firmware updates. I have about 30 Wifi devices in the house so it's nice to spread them. Using 20db on tx. Each radio has it's own channel.
One SSID for the 2.4 radios and one for the 5ghz using a single password for all.
Being a repair/computer tech I purchased them cheaply as broken on Ebay with the most common problem being bricked. _________________ Segment 1 XR700 10Gb LAN, 1Gb WAN ISP BS
Wired AP 1 Unifi Wifi 6 LR US 1Gb LAN
Wired AP 2 Unifi Wifi 6 LR US 1Gb LAN
Wired AP 3 Unifi Wifi 6 LR US 1Gb LAN
Syslog Services Asustor 7110T NAS 10GB
NetGear XS716T 10GB Switch
download1.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/downloads/betas/ (Brain Slayer)
YAMon https://usage-monitoring.com/index.php
Turn wifi off on router and get cheapish mesh system, unsure of your location but i used BT Whole home 4 disc system (purchased used off eBay 2 or 3 years ago), not perfect but cheap enough and perfect hand offs as you roam the 3 story property, discs can be added in garages etc, i use Ethernet backhaul but you can use Wireless backhaul if required.
Joined: 21 Jan 2017 Posts: 1783 Location: Illinois Moderator
Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2020 18:46 Post subject: Re: R9000 Not doing the trick for major signal issues in hou
pan0phobik wrote:
Got an R9000 a few years ago to combat some poor signal issues and for the first few months it was great. It seemed to have conquered our signal issues, wifi was strong, and everyone could download fast.
Over a few months it degraded back to what it was before I bought the R9000.
Since then the router has also been moved upstairs where it isn't far from a laundry chute which I know causes major interference.
I've tried multiple channels on both 5 ghz and 2.4 and nothing seems to improve stability.
We have a 2 story house with a lot of bedrooms, a good amount of mirrors, a laundry chute near where the router currently resides (because I WFH and need a hard wired connection) and signal issues are horrendous at the house.
Should I try DD-WRT firmware? Ubiquiti AP? At my wit's end.
Move to DD-WRT if using stock firmware and then read the sticky about best wifi settings and I think you'll sort out most of your issues. The R9000 should easily cover 2500 sq ft of home, minus 5ghz after three walls...
See my signature. and use the most recent builds available as lots of recent tweaks improving on wifi signal. _________________ FORUM RULES
Posted: Sun Jan 24, 2021 18:46 Post subject: Re: R9000 Not doing the trick for major signal issues in hou
msoengineer wrote:
pan0phobik wrote:
Got an R9000 a few years ago to combat some poor signal issues and for the first few months it was great. It seemed to have conquered our signal issues, wifi was strong, and everyone could download fast.
Over a few months it degraded back to what it was before I bought the R9000.
Since then the router has also been moved upstairs where it isn't far from a laundry chute which I know causes major interference.
I've tried multiple channels on both 5 ghz and 2.4 and nothing seems to improve stability.
We have a 2 story house with a lot of bedrooms, a good amount of mirrors, a laundry chute near where the router currently resides (because I WFH and need a hard wired connection) and signal issues are horrendous at the house.
Should I try DD-WRT firmware? Ubiquiti AP? At my wit's end.
Move to DD-WRT if using stock firmware and then read the sticky about best wifi settings and I think you'll sort out most of your issues. The R9000 should easily cover 2500 sq ft of home, minus 5ghz after three walls...
See my signature. and use the most recent builds available as lots of recent tweaks improving on wifi signal.
Finally got around to doing this and it was a massive improvement. For a week. All the exact same problems returned. I'm at my wit's end and want to just go full blown Office Space on this fucking router.
Joined: 21 Jan 2017 Posts: 1783 Location: Illinois Moderator
Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2021 22:09 Post subject:
I have a R9000 as my daily driver and so does Brainslayer... We're not having any issues with the firmware like you describe...You truly might have a bad router as Netgear had a bad batch of R9000's with flaky wifi radios.
Hopefully you might be under warranty still?
If not, perform a full factory reset. While powered on hold the reset button for 10 seconds and let go. It will reboot and you will be back to defaults. Then, manually re-enter the best wifi settings as seen in my signature link and see how things go.
The status>sys-info page is a good one to watch and see what SNR's are for the various wifi clients. Anything <20 is suspect and will have intermittent issues. 15-16 seems to be the magic number where things turn to total shit.
If you see many clients with low SNR, that means your router is in a bad spot in the house and you need to move it. Again in the best wifi settings I have a link to a good article that talks about router placement- take the time to read it.
The R9000 is a very good router and has very good antenna's and ability to reach far. So as I said, either your hardware is legit going bad or you need to relocate the router... I have no issues with Comcast in IL and my R9000.
The best build at the moment is still 44715 from 2020. _________________ FORUM RULES
I can tell you a couple of the settings that have worked for me. I mainly just use wifi from my iPhone XS and iPhone 8.
I can't say which setting(s) will do you justice but I can tell you what worked for me in an environment that is congested due to many neighbors, as well as physical obstruction type congestion. As far as placement goes for your R9000. The R9000 is one bad ass mofo and it actually does have a very long range, even the 5GHZ band from my experience - however, you need to make sure the thing stays "cool" aka get a computer fan, some of those rubber feet and have it so it can casually blow some nice cool air on it.
As for router/wifi settings, there are many more to change besides these, but I still find these to be very impactful and i've been testing these settings for a few years now...
-Set 5ghz mode to "AC/N-Mixed"
-Set it to VHT160(160Mhz) *do not set it to vht80 + vht80*
-Set your 5ghz wifi channel to "channel 100/5500mhz + UUU14"
-Enable Short preamble mode
-Enable Single User Beamforming
-Do not enable Multi-User Beamforming
-Set your ACK Sensitivity range to "3600" (do this for the 2.4ghz and the disabled AD networks too, 3 changes total of the same parameter on three different broadcast networks)
-If you have Frontier 980mbps download/980mbps upload fiber optic gig internet by any chance, then I recommend changing your MTU setting on the "basics setup --> setup" tab to MTU 1500 / Manual
-I also suggest under the Security tab, to have the SPI firewall enabled, but uncheck all the options except for "filter IDENT" and "ARP Spoofing Protection," unless you happen to have any of the QoS options enabled, then I suggest also checkmarking/enabling "Filter TOS/DSCP"
-Change 2.4Ghz network to either channel 4 or channel 9
-Set 2.4ghz mode to "NG-Mixed"
-Set Channel width to "20mhz" for 2.4ghz network
-Enable "TurboQAM (QAM256 Support)" for the 2.4ghz network
-Change the TX Power setting to "23" (an increase of 3db) to all three networks (5ghz/2.4ghz/60ghz AD) *change it to "30" if you happen to decide to try vht80 and use 5ghz channels 149-161*
Ok i got to sleep or i would type more. good luck and hope this helps - the vht160 mode + channel 100 + UUU14 makes it feel like i am virtually immune to other 5ghz network interference conflicts because everyone around me (like 20+ 5ghz networks my r9000 picks up off the scanner) , all use channels 36-44 or channels 149-161. This feature alone, and the fact that it doesn't "auto switch you if it detects radar" like the other R9000 third party firmware called Voxel does, is truly night and day superior in terms of real every day usability. I find that all my devices, whether its a 7 year old ipad that can only do wireless N, or my 5400mhz 9th gen desktop computer doing vht160 1733mbps, or my iphone doing just 866mbps, every single device has from my amateur testing and experience, shows throughput increases of 20-100% over using vht80 while keeping practically the same latency and jitter measurements. Oh, if you still have weird issues, I sometimes also play around with the RTS/CTS setting and the RTS threshold setting. I recommend either selecting none or RTS/CTS and avoid the CTS setting as I saw some performance drops when using it. Oh yeah and I would disable the "No DNS Rebind" option under the services tab (many of the additional DNS or DHCP options are potential game changers as well, just FYI), and I personally change my TCP timeout from 3600 to 1200, but I leave the UDP timeout at 120. ok cheers and hope you can see how badass the r9000 is. if it isn't, perhaps you got a dud. cheers again
sorry this is total nonsense...
devices that do not support VHT160 will only connect to VHT80 and only to the primary first 80Mhz block (VHT160 is not different than 80+80).
and they don't benefit in the least from the 160mhz
just as useless as disabling DNS rebind, that only makes you susceptible to DNS rebind attacks and has nothing to do with performance at all
Joined: 21 Jan 2017 Posts: 1783 Location: Illinois Moderator
Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2021 14:56 Post subject:
VHT160 and VHT80+80 modes are pure junk on any non-qca client right now. The support for either is sketchy at best with VHT160 being the only working solution I have seen.
Simply, don't use VHT160 or 80+80 unless you are doing backhaul between two routers with identical chipsets. That is the only reason for it right now.
There is a whole sticky on wifi settings for a reason...it's linked in my signature. _________________ FORUM RULES
sorry for the somewhat rude answer, i was short tempered before
here is a picture in the attachment where you can see how VHT160 is built up
HT40 actually consists of 2x20Mhz channels
HT80 consists of 4x20Mhz channels or 2x40Mhz blocks
HT160 consists of 8x20Mhz channels or 4x40Mhz blocks or 2x80Mhz blocks
as you wrote correctly, the difference between VHT160 and VHT80+80 is that the 160Mhz are once contiguous and once separated by a gap... but makes no difference (160Mhz bandwidth is 160Mhz bandwidth)
here is also an example how VHT80 clients behave with a VHT160 router
but doesn't change the fact that 80+80 in summary is exactly 160Mhz bandwidth
or that VHT160 actually consists of 2 80Mhz blocks as well (as you can see from the vht80 client)