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Problems with Zhone 2728A1 wifi

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zacster

Occasional Visitor
My Mother-in-law had fiber run to her country house a few months back. They left her with a Zhone 2728A1 fiber modem/router. When I was up there this past week I checked the speeds and was only getting about 20/20 down/up when using the wifi, plus the wifi signal was pretty weak around the house. The house itself is basically one big room with a loft on top of about a quarter. There is also a finished basement floor.

In the big room you could mostly use the wifi without problem, albeit at a speed I thought was slow. I had a Firestick connect to it and we were able to watch TV over it without any problem. On Zoom calls it could be a little choppy. For regular surfing the issue was that the wifi would stall at times.

In the finished basement it was pretty bad. I found it hard to consistently do anything that had any graphics. It would drop frequently. 2.4g or 5g, it didn't matter.

I would get the same results standing directly in front of the router.

When I plugged a very old macbook directly into the router I got 150/400 down/up. That was probably the limit of what the computer could do, so my guess the line into the house is OK. It was the only device in the house with an ethernet port on it.

Is there anything I can do with the router? I have the "user" id and password (the defaults) but not an admin ID. If there were some admin only setting I'd pass it back to the provider. They want to blame us for not having a proper setup but they did the setup themselves.
 
Nobody? I don't know anything about this company or the router. While the easy route would be to just buy a decent router and disable the wifi on this one, it seems like it should just work.

Next time I'm up there I'll run the network analyzer on my Firestick and see what I get. I didn't think to download something to my phone to check with.
 
Also, since I have coverage problems in my own big house, I decided to buy a mesh system today, the TP-Link X20 wifi 6 boxes. I was looking at MoCa and Deca and other solutions but at the end of the day just putting in a mesh system sounded easiest. It's not like I'm running a huge shop, just 4 people on wifi watching the usual and zoom calls. The only "gaming" going on is Zwift for my indoor cycling, but that's limited to 1080 I think, certainly not 4k. My internet is 220mbps so this mesh system should serve that well. I do stream hi-res music around but I don't think that takes all that much bandwidth either. My house wiring is old and messy in the basement, and I have a single coax run upstairs, no Cat-5 so anything else would require some wiring. It's an old house and that never goes well.

So if I have the mesh system I can try my Archer C7 1750 router at my in-law's house. I'll keep the SSID on it so I can just connect when I'm there to test.
 

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