Only because I do this as part of my job…. Technically, you should not be able to use the 6 GHz band of Wi-Fi outdoors… The FCC recently approved the use of Standard Power, or Phase 2 devices that can be used outdoors, but it enforces a lot of interference recognition and mitigation from the AP. A Low Power Indoor AP (regular consumer 6E AP) does not have the same constraints… Technically, the AP would have no way of knowing if you are outdoors, but just so you know….

You can’t have someting scrutinizing the traffic wihtout slowing it down, Pierce. Think TSA. It’s pointless to “test” that since you can’t consistently have the same traffic.

Thanks for the link, excellent advice.

In this case, Netgear Armor is responsible for the inconsistent upload speeds using the Speedtest.net app I have experienced on the RAXE300. After disabling Armor on the RAXE300, all of my Speedtest.net app results for the last 24 hours have consistently been 940 Mbps up and down to a Frontier server 150 miles away.

Both the browser and the Speedtest.net app are using four TCP/IP connections with a large TCP window size. There must be a difference in the way Armor deals with web traffic vs other TCP connections?

In retrospect, I am not surprised that there is a performance limitation in Armor uplink performance given that symmetric Gigabit and higher links are only recently becoming commonplace.

Dong, with every router company providing some type of network security addition, it would be useful for you to include a test to see if this firmware affects router performance.

More on testing in this post, Pierce.

I installed a RAXE300 one month ago. I have 1Gig Down/Up Frontier Fiber. My Speedtest.net results using the app on a wired Windows 11 desktop were always 940 Mbps down and up with my prior Netgear R7800 router. With the RAXE300, however, I am seeing inconsistent upload speeds; 20% to 40% of my tests to the Frontier Speedtest.net site 150 miles away are below 500 Mbps, with many of the results around 135 Mbps. Like you, I don’t see this problem when using browser based tests.

I have the one-year free Netgear Armor running on the RAXE300. I am going to disable Armor and see if it is responsible.

That router should work, Michael, but I can’t say for sure since I don’t use the service you use. In any case, most, if not all of Asus routers, especially those support Merlin, will likely work.

Hello again Dong. I have had this router for a few months now. Had it with my cable 1 gig service at first and just used the cable modem in bridge mode with the router connected to that modem and it worked perfectly. I had a question, I just had fiber internet installed last week and so far have been unable to get the Netgear to connect and receive consistent internet from the ONT. The installer for the fiber service installed their own modem and told me that I could still use the netgear with the service but I would have to set vlan tagging to tag 201. I was thinking no problem and got into the nighthawk to add this vlan tag. I added the vlan tag but noticed when adding the tag the netgear did not allow me to select the WAN ports for vlan tagging, only the LAN ports. I cannot get this router to connect to my fiber ONT as it looks like the netgear doesn’t support vlan wan tagging that I need.
Am I just way off here and missing something? Or does it appear this router will not work with plugging it directly into the ont? The area I am in does not use PPoE for fiber so I am not needing my login info from the isp, just need to get the vlan tagging figured out. Is there any type of third party firmware that is compatible with this router that would enable this to work? I am just at a loss right now trying to figure this out, I could plug the router into the fiber router I was given, but the provided one doesn’t have very good bridge support and I would rather eliminate the isp provided router. Let me know if you have any tips, this router was great and it would be a shame not to be able to use it with fiber.

It’s the ads on the apps, Michael. My customized test doesn’t include ad delivery from the server itself. (The ads on the page are loaded before the test.)

The RAXE500 uses a Broadcom chip. I’m not sure about the RAXE300, but considering its general specs, it likely also runs on a Broadcom chip.