[SOLVED] Netgear Nighthawk R7000 connectivity issues

[zachnicodemous]

I have had a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 wireless router for around 2 years now. In the past 6 months of so, its developed increasingly worse connectivity issues where devices around my apartment will randomly lose their connection.

I run a "smart" home, with around 5 Alexa devices, 10-15 Smart Bulbs, 10 Smart Outlets and a variety of other "smart" devices. Adding in laptops, PCs, phones, tablets and gaming devices, there can be up to 30-40 devices connected to the wireless network at any given time. I'm not sure if this is part of the problem as it seems to me that this router should be able to handle a high number of devices.

The connections are split evenly between two wireless channels running off the device; a 2.4ghz and 5hz.

What I have tried:

• Reading numerous forum threads about the R7000 and attempting fixes suggested in various places.
• A complete factory reset of the device.
• Upgraded firmware to the very latest version.
• Downgraded firmware to the version that shipped with the device two years ago.
• I tried a few firmware versions in between those.
• Used a network analyzer to detect what channels are most heavily in use in my neighborhood so that I could switch my networks to lesser-used channels.

None of this has helped.

I'm unsure at this point as to whether I just need to replace the device, or get some kind of wireless switch or something so I can spread out the wireless connections between more than one device.

I'm at my whits end with this so I am hoping to get some good advice here.

Thanks
Zach

 

[bill001g]

These tend to be very hard to figure out. In general it is more the total bandwidth being used that is the limit more than the total number of devices. I suspect there is a actual limit but device that pretty much sit idle I can't see causing much issues.

If it is just random devices drop off it is kinda different than if they all drop at the same time. Do the ones closer to the router seem more stable or does it not matter.

When you live in apartments you have massive amounts of interfering wifi signals. The scanner software is not very useful it only show the routers broadcast message not if it is really being used. I used to configure my router to put out 20 different ssid to scare people off even though I was only really using 1. In addition they tend to not show all the channels being used. 2.4g signals actually use blocks of 8 of those channels (ie 40mhz) and there is only 60mhz total. On 5g it is a similar issue and the newest wifi6 routers can use all the bandwidth available with a single device.

Not sure if it work better close to the router you could try putting in AP to create more radio sources. Best would be if you have ethernet cable to other rooms. You could try powerline or moca if you do not have ethernet/ I would not even consider a repeater in your case because now you have 2 signals that can get corrupted and the end device will also many times connect to the wrong source anyway.