Apologies to Intel!!! AC dual band AC3160 slow internet speeds. I was wrong.

[mJohn30]

OK let me start off by apologizing to Intel as a whole and specifically. So I took my previous Dell computer back to Best buy and ordered an Acer from Amazon specifically for this Intel chip issue. Now the Dell came with the dual band AC3160 adapter and the Acer came with the dual band AC7260. When I got the Acer Aspire V3 setup and connected with my Netgear Nighthawk R7000 I hit the same problem as I did with the Dell about 200 kbps throughput.

At this point I am thinking Intel cant possibly be this bad in the wireless adapter arena. So I hop on my desktop which is wire connected to the same Netgear NIghthawk and sure enough my speed is at over 120 Mbps(my Internet connection is rated at 100 Mbps). Then I jump on my Mac which also has 802.11ac adapter and boom over 70Mbps. So damn I am thinking its the firewall or drivers. I update all the laptop drivers to the latest versions test; still 200 kbps then uninstall the firewall, disable windows firewall and test; still 200k,then uninstall the virus and internet protection still 200k... a little perplexed at that point so I said well let me wire connect and see what I get. So I plug up the RJ45 directly from the laptop(the Dell didnt have an RJ45 connection but this new Acer did) to the Nighthawk gigabit-port.... all the lights on the Nighthawk are white(meaning they negotiated at 1 Gbps, amber would mean the end device plugged into the Nighthawk could only do 100 Mbps) so connection auto-negotiation is solid and we got good connection. So I run my speed test and boom 200k. :-/

I am thinking this is insane so again I jump back to my Desktop run speed test and over 130 Mbps down and 30 Mbps up, so I am definitely good on my router/internet connection. I check the firmware on the NIghthawk I am on the latest firmware version. Then I move the Acer to the Nighthawk's DMZ and monitor the logs to ensure nothing is blocking nor interfering with the speed tests. Results remained the same EVEN ON THE WIRE which was about 200k. So at this point I am thinking there is something weird between the Nighthawk and new nodes being added to my network.. checked the ip address pool... no overlaps, rebooted the Nighthawk a couple of times, still at 200k on both wired and wireless from the new Acer.

Ok I am desperate so lets just bypass the Nighthawk altogether and go straight to the cable modem. BOOM 133 Mbps.... whew... ok so its not anything the Acer laptop ... so let's revisit the conversation between the Nighthawk and the Acer.. after pouring over the Nighthawks configuration for about 30 more minutes it jumped out at me.

The Nighthawk recommend using the downstream and upstream QoS policy along with WMM which is an absolutely amazing and fantastic feature but what they dont tell you is WHEN ADDING NEW DEVICES, THE DEVICES MAC ADDRESS NEED TO BE ADDED TO THE QOS DOWNSTREAM POLICY LIST. Since my wired and wireless MAC addresses werent on the QoS Policy list they were being rate limited downstream to 200 kbps.

All in all depending on your wireless router you may need to disable your default or custom QoS policy; or modify it to add your new MAC addresses. I hope this is help some.

[jbenavides]

Hello mrqjohnson1,

Thank you very much for the information you have provided, this will be very useful for other users facing this type of issue. We are glad that you were able to resolve the problem and that your wireless connection is now working properly.