[SOLVED] upgrading Netgear Nighthawk X8 R5300

[Nate167]

I'm currently running a Netgear Nighthawk x8 and I'm looking to upgrade. I've had the current router since it's release and noticing more and more random network drops on both wifi and wired connections. I want to upgrade and need advice for which router would be best for my home network setup. Below are the devices and everything on the network. I was looking at the Asus RTAX86U due to it's high ratings but not sure it will handle my current network setup.

Nighthawk X8
Nighthawk AC1900 range extender
2 Netgear POE switches
2 Netgear regular switches.

14 wireless devices (phones, tablets, smart home devices)

20 Wired devices
5 POE cameras
Smart TV's
multiple computers (2 on VPN)
Apple TV

 

[bill001g]

It likely is not a "upgrade". First your current router has 2 5g radios which should allow you to spread your devices over both radios and get more total throughput. It all depends on if you have used that feature.

Next wifi6 is greatly limited by end devices. First they must be wifi6 in the first place or they will just run like the currently do on your current router. Next most wifi6 device only support 2x2 mimo and even more important most only support 80mhz radio channels unlike the 160mhz bands in the asus router. The 160mhz radio band is what makes wifi6 faster. This is also part of the reason the asus router does not have 2 5g radios. It has enough trouble trying to get 1 160mhz radio band and will not be able to get 2.
So in many cases even when you have wifi6 device they will not run better or faster than 802.11ac. It all depends on your end devices.

In addition you have repeater/ range extenders. These could be part of the current issue with dropping sessions. In general these should work with the Asus router BUT only in the most simple repeater mode. Any so called mesh ability will not work since those are proprietary to vendors.
Your wifi6 devices if you have them would need to connect directly to the router since the repeaters are not wifi6.

So if you are using both 5g radios I would look at another similar router. Maybe even buy another one just like you have that router is well liked and maybe the one you have is broken.

Now if you really want to spend money you can look at wifi6e stuff. Again in the short term it will likely not be any upgrade. Until wifi6e end devices get more common we will not see how much difference the new 6g radio band helps. Of course all the marketing guys and fake review sites claim it is the best thing ever.

 

[Nate167]

It likely is not a "upgrade". First your current router has 2 5g radios which should allow you to spread your devices over both radios and get more total throughput. It all depends on if you have used that feature.

Next wifi6 is greatly limited by end devices. First they must be wifi6 in the first place or they will just run like the currently do on your current router. Next most wifi6 device only support 2x2 mimo and even more important most only support 80mhz radio channels and the 160mhz bands like the asus router. The 160mhz radio band is what makes wifi6 faster. This is also part of the reason the asus router does not have 2 5g radios. It has enough trouble trying to get 1 160mhz radio band and will not be able to get 2.
So in many cases even when you have wifi6 device they will not run better or faster than 802.11ac. It all depends on your end devices.

In addition you have repeater/ range extenders. These could be part of the current issue with dropping sessions. In general these should work with the Asus router BUT only in the most simple repeater mode. Any so called mesh ability will not work since those are proprietary to vendors.
Your wifi6 devices if you have them would need to connect directly to the router since the repeaters are not wifi6.

So if you are using both 5g radios I would look at another similar router. Maybe even buy another one just like you have that router is well liked and maybe the one you have is broken.

Now if you really want to spend money you can look at wifi6e stuff. Again in the short term it will likely not be any upgrade. Until wifi6e end devices get more common we will not see how much difference the new 6g radio band helps. Of course all the marketing guys and fake review sites claim it is the best thing ever.

Thank you for the feedback. I have the range extender hard wired into the network. Would that cause the drops on my wired devices as well? I'm not so much worried about Wifi6 capability as I'm with you that it will be a while before it's the main stream wifi choice. The only Wifi 6 devices we will probably have in the near future would be phones and/or tablets. Thanks for pointing out the 2 5G radios...I missed that part when shopping for a new router.

What are your thoughts about the Netgear x6s or the tplink archer c5400x?Would one or the other be a worthy upgrade or not really?

 

[bill001g]

Dropping of wired devices might be your internet dropping. This at times is hard to test. You could see if there were any log messages in the router. You would want to see if it rebooted or something. You could also leave a ping run to the router IP. Most time if there is a router failure you won't be able to ping. Then again it could be something on the wan port and then you can't tell if it is the internet/modem or the router.

The netgear6 is a 3x3 rather than a 4x4. Again it depends on if your devices have 4 antenna and can use it. The tplink device is actually identical to your current netgear except the netgear uses a extra switch chip to get 6 lan ports. Now there are actually mulitple hardware version of the tplink with that name (I hate tplink does this). The newest one uses exactly the same wifi chips and cpu chips as the netgear x8 but uses a different brand of memory.

 

[bill001g]

So after I type this I find a third variation of the tplink router. Seems there is a difference when the part has a "x" on the end. That router still uses the same radio chips but has a faster cpu and more memory as well a more lan ports. The faster cpu would only matter if you were doing something like running vpn on the router. The wifi should be identical.

 

[Nate167]

I will lose connection on both wired and wireless devices. When I go to browse the web I will get a server can not be reached error and usually have to refresh 2-4 times and it will then connect. I did some ping tests on various wired devices on my network and the longest was 8-9ms with the average being 5ms. For reference my ISP is Spectrum with a constant 400-500Mbps. When we first moved in I was having issues and they ran a new line into the house that is already set up for gb internet if I decided to upgrade the plan. My modem is an Arris SB6190. I decided to look and see what wifi my primary wireless devices use and we are running Iphone 12 pro's which support wifi6. My wife also just got a new laptop that supports 6 as well. We both run VPN's for work all day long since we are remote(one work computer wired the other wireless). My wife also likes to stream movies on her phone for background noise while working. Really confused on which direction to go here. I've never owned a TPlink router and not sure how they compare outside of reviews you can find on the net. Historically I've used netgear, linksys, and asus.

 

[bill001g]

Tplink in general has more features that netgear or linksys but not as fancy as asus. It is mostly a read the manual and see what features it has that you might use. Most routers have lots of stuff few people care about.

I don't know if apple has released a phone that has 160mhz support. The other feature that makes wifi6 faster is qam1024 but you must be very close to the router for this to work well. At a more normal distance using qam256 and 80mhz channels you use a encoding rate of 960 compared to 866 you see on 802.11ac.
This is the key reason you see almost no difference between wifi5 and wifi6.

The modem has a log you might see error messages around the time. Also there is a screen that show uncorrectable errors which is packet loss. You will always see some loss but the number should not change a lot.

I would leave a ping run to 8.8.8.8 and see if you see loss on that. You might be getting a DNS issues rather than a packet loss issue.

 

[Nate167]

Well I ran a ping on that ip and had zero lost out of 296 packets sent/received. Min was 22ms max was 53ms and avg was 29ms

 

[bill001g]

You likely need to leave it run constantly in the background. What you want is to be able to check it when you get a the other error.

If the ping works but you still see errors it is likely a DNS issues. The default way the dns works is for the router to act as a proxy using your ISP DNS. The most common way to bypass this is to manually set the dns to something like 8.8.8.8 in the IPv4 settings. You want to disable IPv6 while you are in there. The other way if you use chrome or firefox is to set the dns in the browser. In that case you want to use 1.1.1.1 cloudflare. This allows encrypted DNS over https so it stops the ISP and anyone else from snooping on your DNS queries.

 

[Nate167]

I ran the ping while on the web and got the server errors. I checked the pings and there were zero packets lost. I went in and changed my dns settings as you suggested and that has fixed the problem! Crazy that was causing the issue but thank you for suggesting that.

 

[bill001g]

Router failures are pretty rare and most times the device gets hung and you have to power cycle it.

It is not as easy to change things like phones. What you need to do is see if you can set the DNS to 8.8.8.8 in the DHCP setting in the router. This is different than the Dns you sometimes see on the wan. This is a setting that tells it what to send your PC when it sends you a IP address.

If you do IPCONFIG /all when you have it configured correctly you should see it sent you that dns. By default it sends the IP of the router.

 

[Nate167]

Thank you for this. I’ll have to dig around in the router settings tonight. I found the dhcp settings but it only has a port range setting and no dns. I did set the ipv4 to 8.8.8.8