Netgear X4S R7800 Set up

markb1980

Thank you again for your help. One last thing i did the firmware upgrade to the latest after I had got my connection working as i did it via internet download instead of file seems it was connected now, but do I still need to reset the router again now it has the latest firmware on?

psychopomp1

If the router is working fine, then leave things as they are. However if it starts misbehaving then do a factory reset and reconfigure from scratch.

mickevh

There's no real "right" or "wrong" way to do this - it's a value judgement. Think of it like having two AP's in one box, each serving a different waveband. Thence it's pretty much like any multi-AP infrastructure:

If you make the SSID names and passphrases the same, then clients may automatically choose (and switch between) wavebands just like "roaming" between physical AP's. If/when to initiate a roaming assessment is decision made by the client device not "the system" and some clients will doggedly hand on to a working link, even if it gets really crappy. Some clients allow a degree of control so that you can tell them to "prefer" a particular waveband. Some offer no control and you are in the gift of their designers decisions about if/when to roam. And of course, some client devices are only single band anyway (usually 2.4GHz) though these are getting rarer. Some AP's include mechanisms to try and "encourage" clients to a particular waveband (usually 5GHz) as it affords faster speeds and sometimes they try to load balance client between the two. Usually, this is only at first admission rather than "mid-session" but you never know - none of this is mandated in standards.

If you make the SSID's/passphrase differ, clients will never roam between wavebands and you will always have to explicitly choose which one you connect to (and if/when to change.)

There are advantages and disadvantage to both approaches, you might care to try it each way for a few weeks and see which you prefer.

It's interesting they are using that terminology in the router admin - it used to be meaningless and you'd never find such settings in a "proper" enterprise class firewall. "Closed/moderate/open" NAT was an indication of the effect of the NAT settings, rather than the settings themselves (IIRC MS invented it for their XBoxes.) Maybe vendors are giving you a "one click" to make the changes. There's a few different variations of NAT and extra complexities such as port triggering and uPNP which can all effect the online gaming experience, hence the gaming devices included a process to assess this effect and report back as closed/moderate/open.

markb1980

I think I just like to have control over what devices are on what channel. There are other options which  I have not played with yet like Smart Connect where by I think that gives two 5g channels and one 2g channel and it just shows as one SSID when searching, the router will then decide where it goes. I have uPNP switched on as I think this allows ports to be opened when needed for gaming? There are so many settings!

psychopomp1

IMHO a wise choice giving each wifi network/radio a unique name as you then have 100% control over which clients connect to which network. Btw the R7800 is dual band, not tri-band so will have a single 2.4ghz radio and a single 5ghz radio. I would leave 'Smart Connect' off, otherwise it means you setup a single SSID for the 2 radios and let the router dictate (using its Smart Connect algorithms) which clients go on which band. My router (Linksys EA9500) has a similar feature called Band Steering and when I switched it on, i found it didn't work too well, ie most clients ended up on the slower 2.4ghz band despite all of them supporting 802.11ac wifi standard.

markb1980

Thank you. Yes I did read that Smart Connect was not entirely accurate with how it worked and caused a few problems. One thing I have noticed is with the 5ghz WiFi if I stand next to the router and do a speed test, one time it will be 50Mbps download speed then run it again in the same place 30 secs later it will be 20Mbps download speed. My internet package is 60Mbps download and 12Mbps upload. Upload always seems to be around 12Mbps but download fluctuates a lot. What should I expect to get on WiFi if my package is 60Mbps? If I run the speed test on the nighthawk app which I have been informed only measures what’s coming from the ONT to the router it is pretty much bang on 60Mbps where as using the Speedtest.net app it shows the fluctuation coming from the router to the devices?

mickevh

If it's anything like the enterprise kit I installed a few years ago that had "band steering," it basically worked thus: When a client first tries to connect on the 2.4GHz band, the AP ignores it in the hope it will give up and try "somewhere else" ie the 5GHz  band (or another AP) if it tries again, it ignores it, but on the third attempt it lets in in anyway. Newer kit has a kind of "hint" mechanism whereby AP's can tell a client "you might be better off talking to X." In extremis, some kit will let you ban designated clients from given AP's, bands, SSID's etc but that's a pretty brutal approach and not very helpful to your average SOHO deployment.

Internet speed tests are not a very useful too for assessing local links (be they wired or Wi-Fi) as your Internet speed test is testing the entire pathway between the source and sink device which effectively tests the slowest "hop" in that path. Usually this is your ISP link, thusly it isn't "stressing" the local links to their maximum capacity.

If you have a couple of devices available locally, you could run up you own speed test server on a PC at home, then test against it instead of the Internet based test site, thusy taking the ISP link (and everything beyond) out of the equation. NetIO and iPerf (both free) are our favourite tools for so doing in these parts. Ideally you run up the "server" programme on a wired PC.

I am fond of saying, such speed tests don't actually test the "speed" of anything, what they do is send a measured amount of data, time how long it takes and compute a statistical average. As such, they don't take any account of other traffic on the network (amongst many other factors that could affect the results.) Thusly you want to run them a few times and look for average. Even then it's something of a "wet finger" metric. For example, if testing (say) 100mbps ethernet, we don't expect (say) NetIO to come up with the same number every time, and because of things like protocol overheads and so forth we don't expect to get 100mbps - we tend to be looking for order of magnitude indications and trend. For example if we tested a gigabit ethernet link and got "only" 89mbps performance, we'd suspect the link hasn't actually come up at gigabit and investigate. We wouldn't worry that our gigabit link "only" tested at (say) 872mbps - that's fine, for a quick and dirty test, it's in the right ball park.

Wi-Fi is fundamentally an "only-one-thing-at-a-time-can-transmit" technology - the more "things" there are (including any neighbours) the more data they want to transmit, the more competition there is for "air time." Thusly, you could run three speed tests in a row, and if your neighbours or one of the kids kicks off a download at the same time, it could hit your test results. Not to mention all the interference sources. It's fickle.

Wi-Fi, I'm afraid, is "just like that" - the transmission medium, ie the radio waves, don't "belong" to anyone and everyone is entitled to use them. Essentially, we all have to "play nice together." (There are mechanisms built into the standards to enforce this.) I live in flats, all the neighbours have Wi-Fi too and finding a radio channel all to myself is impossible.

So, particularly for Wi-Fi, run the tests quite a few times and at different times of day and look for trend rather than absolute numbers or occasional aborations. If at all possible, use the likes of NetIO or iPerf for testing your local links and leave the Internet speed test for testing your Internet service.

markb1980

Thank you for a very informative post.