Feeling remorse for upgrading Disappointed can I go back to what we had before?

Hello, Community,

I had a Verizon tech come out and upgrade our family fios from 100up/100down to 400up/400down. I just did a speedtest and I am getting 83.54up/78.54down. This doesn't even meet my old plan. Very disappointed.

I purchased the router from Verizon, and the tech decided the place in the basement instead of in the living room where the old router was located. He placed an extender in the living room and we can't seem to connect to it. Could this be why we keep getting kicked off? Should we move the router upstairs and the extender downstairs?

We keep getting kicked off the internet and it feels slower than what we had before.

When we called the tech, he said it's because we have apple devices. I am going to call **bleep** on that explanation since we are not completely unaware of how routers work.

I just want to go back to what we had before it wasn't broken and did not feel slow it's just that our contract was ending I thought why not upgrade since Verizon has been so stable. Ugh, what happened? You have turned me from a fan of Verizon who was considering moving cell phone service over to a skeptic who suspects you are no different than Comcast.

I have tried to chat with an agent a few times but they are always busy, so here I am looking for answers.

Thank you for reading

Accepted answers

Hitgirl2

UPDATE:

I got Verizon to come out and review the set up. They made some changes like putting the extender on the top floor and I would not let him leave until he ran speed tests on all floors. I asked a lot of questions and made sure we had all devices logged in. They also sent a much more capable tech. He knew his stuff. So far so good no more problems. Thank you everyone.

All comments

jonjones1

The factors on your internet speeds are first to make sure verizon provisioned you for that 400/400 that is what I would do first. If they say it’s provisioned correctly then I would get your router back to where it was previously. There was no reason to move it to the basement. Now when you say speeds are Low 80/90’s is that on direct connection to the verizon router? Not wifi. Wifi is not guaranteed.

the extenders are junk. a good tri band router with outside antennas is or should do the job. And being told it’s apples fault is bunk from the tech. I use apple products with no issue. I also use my own Netgear Nighthawk router so I don’t have an issue.

there is no really great jump from 100/100 to 400/400 except in price paid to the provider. And yes you can jump back on internet.

Cang_Household

What are the models of your devices? This is very important to let me help you.

Regarding Wifi, my FiOS Quantum Gateway G1100 can deliver 454Mbps (M-lab Speed Test) over 5GHz. I have a WCB3000N (MoCA 1.1, quite old, built in 2012, Verizon provided for free) upstair delivering 136Mbps over 2.4GHz.

The other thing is to make sure all the devices are running the highest rated WiFi protocols. The newest "WiFi 6" protocol is 802.11ax on G3100? I don't have any device that supports this protocol though. G1100 and G3100 support 802.11b/g/n/ac too. If you are connecting via 802.11g, then you are bottlenecked to 54Mbps. You need at least 802.11n to achieve around 175Mbps, or 802.11ac, 300Mbps.

Don't put the extender and the router near each other. Since they will broadcast the same SSID, some wireless devices cannot distinguish which one to use, so you will be "kicked off" very frequently from one or the other. Or, you can modify the extender's SSID to different ones, and let devices choose which one has a stronger signal.

I am not a big fan of purchasing non-Verizon extenders and wireless access points. Routers, maybe, you can add more features.

If you have more questions, please ask.

smith6612

We need some more information. Is the extender a Verizon extender or some off the shelf unit? What model is your router and extender?

Speeds like that are suggestive of poor Wi-Fi configuration. You could also have 100Mbps Ethernet somewhere.

Start off by using Verizon's speed test. https://speedtest.verizon.com/ . With a FiOS router in the mix, there is a "Device" test it performs, which tells you what speed your device is getting, and then a "Router" Test which tells your router to perform a speed test. You should see your expected 400Mbps speed on the Router test. If not, we need to target that first and figure out why it's broken. If you see your speed on Router but not Device, then we can start blaming your network setup, and help you optimize it.

As for drops, this usually boils down to a couple things. On FiOS routers and the Extenders, this can be due to the SON functionality. This allows the routers to self configure on separate channels, and to steer your devices between bands AND access points. Some devices don't play nicely with this.

Additionally, the FiOS routers have a habit of aggressively changing their wireless channels when the routers are set to use auto channels. This is problematic for two reasons:

The router chooses DFS channels unless you disable them. Not all devices support DFS channels and this forces them onto the 2.4Ghz band. With SON enabled, this can also cause these devices to disconnect due to band steering.
The channel will change while devices are connected. This causes pauses or disconnects in connectivity.

At the minimum, you should DISABLE auto channel selection and set the router to use any channel on 5Ghz* or Channels 1, 6, and 11 on 2.4Ghz. 5Ghz is asterisked because you'll need to see if all of your devices support 5Ghz DFS. Here's a good reference chart: https://sites.google.com/a/mikealbano.com/clients/home . Any channel in between channel 48 and 149 are "DFS" channels. 48 and 149 themselves are not DFS.

For the extender/repeater, I can't answer anything until you reply with what kind it is and what the model is.

Hitgirl2

UPDATE: