Potential Solution to Droid Turbo Wi-Fi Issues

[HarryHomeowner]

All - I recently upgraded my Droid Razor M to a Turbo and experienced the "dial-up speed" wi-fi issues that many have posted here and other forums.  The issue I had was the Turbo was the only device in my house that when connected to my wo-fi, performed on par with my ancient DSL service (varying from 1.5 Mbps to a peak of 3.5 Mbps down if even that, and below 1 Mbps up).  My current internet provider is Cox Cable Premier service - 100Mbps.  Now the only device in the house that achieves the triple digit speed is my Dell tower, direct wired to the router.  All other wi-fi phones and tablets achieved anywhere from a low of 9 Mbps to 30 Mbps down and 5 Mbps to 15 Mbps up using the Ookla Speedtest app on all devices.  The Turbo did not achieve these numbers on wi-fi, but did render speeds in the 30 Mbps on 4G LTE (I live 0.3 mile from two towers).  I knew something was gravely wrong when during the Turbo activation the download estimate for the YouTube app was 2 hours!  5 Hours for Amazon Kindle!  I don't think so!  It's sad when the old phone (Razor M) performs BETTER than the new one it replaced!

I ended getting a replacement because we (both Verizon and I) though the phone was defective.  If I only knew then what I now know I could have saved a week of pain and agony - quite the time-sucking activity figuring out why your new phone performs worse than older generation devices.

I received the second phone only to have the same issue.  After long calls to Verizon tech support, reading numerous online forums regarding Droid Turbo wi-fi issues ad nausium and not finding any "solutions" that  improved wi-fi performance, I finally hunkered down and went into my Netgear WNDR3800 router and started changing config options one-by-one.  Short story is the 3800 is a dual band router, and when I changed the Netgear defaults on each channel's mode to "legacy" - up to 54 Mbps - voila!  The darn thing actually worked MUCH better!  My son and wife both have new iPhone 6 and both returned in the 30 Mbps down BEFORE I changed the above settings.  Apparently Motorola and Apple use different Wi-Fi chips, the former must use a version that cannot deal with the newer router settings.  Apple's must be smart enough to ignore and use what it needs.

Needless to say, this is the LAST Motorola phone I will ever buy.  There is absolutely no reason for this situation.  It's a shame because I really liked my Razor M when it came out and everything "just worked" - oh right, that's Apple.  😉  I had high hopes for the Turbo - glad it is fixed and I will trade in as soon as I am allowed to without taking a bath financially on it.

Would love to hear if any other Droid Turbo owners have had similar issues.  Also what about other Droid maker's phones? Any similar issues, or am I just the lucky lottery winner here?

Best regards,

A (soon to be) Former Moto Owner

[Ann154]

Personally I would have suggested working on the router before replacing the phone after my own experience with Samsung and HTC device before I got my current Motorola phone.

[Myoung01]

I have a turbo phone too. My phone used to be super fast on my wifi.. I have like 40mbps. About 9 months ago it got really slow. I have had my internet provider out here 3 times and can't seem to find anything wrong on their end. Called Verizon and they had me do a matter reset. So I backed everything up, did the reset, phone is slower now then before, I lost all of my contacts, I'm one furious guy right now. I logged into cloud to download my contacts and they were all there and about three seconds later they all disappeared forever. Hope they find a solution.. I'm kind of thinking about an I phone too for my next phone