Help with Netgear Nighthawk throttling speed.

[PopsicleHustler]

Hi all

 

So I (or my rather my father) came across this problem.

 

He bought this fancy Netgear Nighthawk router for whatever reason...

 

Anyway, he is on n 1Gbit internet (Virgin Media, Ireland) and this router throttles their connection like crazy.

 

I have no experience with such routers, but he asked me to come and try looking at it since my dad also has no idea what to do.

 

They have 3 PCs connected to with cable + phones and tablets on wifi. With their old router they had normal 100+MB/s down speed. Now with this new one they have less than 20MB/s download AND it throttles the connection so much, nobody can play or watch anything if 1 person is streaming 4k or downloading something at mere 15-20MB/s.

 

Any ideas/suggestions/tips as to what I should be looking for? Tomorrow I'm going to his house to see what is going on, so might post screenshots of settings. But would be nice to have some heads-up on what I should be looking for. 

[OhioYJ]

30 minutes ago, PopsicleHustler said:

He bought this fancy Netgear Nighthawk router for whatever reason...

Netgear has many routers named "Nighthawk".  Does the machine that "takes over the connection" get the full speed, and is able to keep the speed?

 

Before my switch to pfsense I always had to modify my routers and cable modems as they would throttle during extended downloads as they would get warm. A cooling fan would prevent this and ensure my speeds were consistent all the time. If you speeds are fast and then slow down, it could be a cooling issue.

 

If only certain devices are fast (wired), could be cabling. Try swapping cables. If it's wireless, and consistently the same devices, it could be an interference issue. Either from placement, or other devices in the house, or other routers nearby, perhaps trying another channel would help.

 

Maybe it's just poorly managed? I haven't used Netgear router in a long time. Perhaps you need to look at some QOS settings?

[Donut417]

3 hours ago, PopsicleHustler said:

ny ideas/suggestions/tips as to what I should be looking for?

People think because a router has Gigabit ports that it can do Gigabit internet. Thats not correct by any means. Gigabit ports are needed to support anything over 100 Mbps. When you get faster internet the router's SOC has to be able to do NAT at that speed. The crappier the SOC the slower of a connection that router will support. What you need is the LAN to WAN and WAN to LAN throughput. The issue is most router manufactures dont provide this info. You might find this info on Smallnetbuilder.com as they do some testing, but you will need to know the specific model of Netgear router and search for it on their site. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

6 hours ago, PopsicleHustler said:

Anyway, he is on n 1Gbit internet (Virgin Media, Ireland) and this router throttles their connection like crazy.

If its a fancy router its probably trying to do some sort of QoS, which is not going to end well on such a fast connection.  Its mostly useful for slower ones.

 

With Virgin it tends to be more useful if you can throttle uploads but NOT downloads.  Its where you get the most benefit and also more likely the router can handle it.  Unfortunately I am not familiar with their UI to tell you how to do that.

 

Their gaming routers try to automatically determine your speed and throttle it accordingly, this can also be flawed if their speed test is not performing correctly, apparently its called Goodput which could be something to look at turning off.  If there is a way to enter your speed manually, you may be able to set download to 0 to only throttle upload.

 

If you aren't concerned about that stuff, just turn QoS off entirely.   If you don't upload a lot or not while gaming, it may not be needed.  I've been running without QoS since getting Gigabit myself.