BGW210-700 has performance anxiety

[jonathanscott21]

I'm a brand new customer, and while my BGW210-700 is getting fantastic speed test results, my page loads, video streaming, and even ads are all much slower than I'm used to with my 60 Mbps plan with Comcast and a 4 year old docsys 3 modem. I've had to restart it at least twice in 3 days. Can anyone else speak to this? There's a few suggestions on google, like not using the 5GHZ band. If any other users have solid tips to keep me going till I get a permanent resolution, they would be much appreciated.

[bobrk]

The default ATT DNS servers might be to blame. I switched to OpenDNS and things seem better. I haven't seen a way to change them in the ATT router itself and I don't use the WiFi feature of that modem, so I changed them in the eero which sits behind it.

[apl]

I made two changes that improved wifi performance for myself. They may or may not apply in your case.

1) The router tries to choose a channel without too much interference from your neighbors, but it can only do this based on what other signals it sees at the router location. I used an app on my phone called wifiman to see how strong signals from my neighbors were at the other end of the house (where I use my laptop) and found that there was a very strong signal interfering on the selected channel there. So I set the channel manually to one with less interference at both ends of the house.

2) Try giving the 2.4 GHz bands and 5 GHz bands different names. The router will warn you when you do this it will no longer be able to switch clients between them based on what it thinks will give the best performance. It turned out (I think) that this automatic switching was what was causing a lot of my poor performance, because the 5 GHz channel doesn't work well at long distances, but the router kept switching the client to it.