We've been having terrible Internet connections with our Spectrum for about a year and it only got really bad this last week.......we're supposed to be getting "up to" 200 Mbps but have never gotten that.....we used to get around 118 Mbps, until early last year (2020) when it dropped to an average of 70 Mbps and never went much higher than that, often being even lower.
We tolerated the slow speed all this time because it was still faster than our DSL, which by comparison, is practically dial-up (.6 to 1.1 Mbps)......whenever Spectrum loses its connection, we have to switch over to the DSL which is really only good for two people doing a little surfing and email.....NO streaming, NO video conferencing, etc.
This past week (July 2021) our Spectrum connection has been constantly disconnecting on top of the slow speeds................all I could get out of Spectrum is that our area is experiencing "outages" but they "are working on the issue".......there was no reason given for the problems.
I had already been thinking about upgrading our 10-year old Cisco/Linksys D3000 router and replacing the Spectrum issued modem, so in addition to an Arris SB6190 Surfboard modem, I got this NETGEAR Nighthawk Smart Wi-Fi Router (R6900P) - AC1900 Wireless Speed router...............I figured I would see if they could possibly improve our Internet connection in the slightest, at least with the speed.......since the "outage" problem was with Spectrum.
I just installed both over the last two days, installing the Surfboard SB6190 modem first........our Internet Speed doubled....to around 151 Mbps, which I thought was great!
However, the next day (yesterday) after swapping the Linksys E3000 router with the NETGEAR R6900P, we had instant improvement of our Internet speed, above what improvement I saw with the modem the day before.......by almost 4x what we were getting over the last year!
No joke, we went from about 70 Mbps (right before I swapped the modems and over a year before that) to an average of 240 Mbps......I've been checking it often for the last 24 hours......I'm still shocked at the speeds I'm seeing.
Of course, I can't help wonder if there was some miracle at Spectrum that happened that dramatically increased our Internet speed at the exact same time that I changed the router, especially since we're still experiencing off and on disconnects.
The only thing I can think of that could be increasing our Internet speed is that I have this Nighthawk set to WPA2/PSK AES security and I may have had our 10-year old Linksys E3000 set to use both WPA/PSK TKIP & AES, which could result in slower speeds (because of the TKIP), but I'll need to see if I had saved any of the previous settings for reference to confirm.
BTW, it was super easy to swap the routers, I just copied all of our same passkey & router name info, including No SSID Broadcasting as I always set previous routers, all of which was an option in the Setup process, to make the transition smooth for all of our connected devices, including the Ring® doorbell & NETGEAR Extender downstairs and it went very well! (I always disable SSID Broadcasting for added security......it does NOT prevent devices from connecting wirelessly if the correct SSID & passkey is entered and saved on the device.....by disabling the SSID Broadcast, our neighbors can't see our router's name or that it even exists).
In fact, the NETGEAR NightHawk R6900P is using both 2.4GHz & 5GHz simultaneously, something that our Linksys E3000 was supposed to do, but never really did (I could tell on the admin screen for the E3000 that it was always broadcasting 5G, which it should still do, if even no devices are connecting through it).
The only small issue is with logging into the router's settings, all of my previous routers over the last 20+ years, I've been able to assign the router's User Name and Password, but with the NightHawk, I can only change the router's password, you cannot change the User Name from "admin", which seems odd to me.
Otherwise, as of installing this router 24 hours ago, I'm completely impressed, however, if anything changes, I will update my review.
Note: in one of the two photos, you'll see the fourth LED from the right is orange/amber......that was indicating that one of the PCs I have hooked up to the router via ethernet was at 100Mbps vs 1000Mbps or gigabit......that PC was not powered on and hadn't been since installing the Nighthawk, but as soon as I powered it up, it went to white.
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
|---|
