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Question

Internet seems to 'bottleneck' (possible Google Wifi issue?)

May 11, 2017 10:18PM PDT

Hello all! My household got Google WiFi a few months ago and it was spectacular. Great speed and coverage in the whole house. The problem was that the WiFi devices couldn't see the devices connected to my ISP's router through ethernet, which meant that my printer was inaccessible from the desktops and that my phone couldn't find my PC to stream/transfer files when I wanted.

To fix all this, I disabled the DCHP on the router and made the Google WiFi our main router. After a rocky start setting up my Plex server and resolving a Double NAT issue (at least, I thought I resolved it) everything worked ok for a bit.

This past week though, it started acting up. When loading a webpage, it will (about 40% of the time) fail to load and list DNS as the issue, or it will just spin like it's loading and never actually load until I retry the page. This has been happening more frequently on my phone, and I've been leaving the WiFi off to just not deal with it - apps wouldn't update, it would have trouble contacting Google's servers, and it would load slow as hell.

I thought it was just me, but my friend reported running into the same issues today. Since I know it's not confined to a single computer on the network now, what's my next step in finding out the problem? We have Frontier FIOS, so our up and down speed is blazing when we test it. Did I configure our router wrong? Is there too much traffic for the Google WiFi router to handle? Any suggestions on what to try next would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Discussion is locked

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Clarification Request
Let's hear a little more.
May 11, 2017 10:28PM PDT

To really use the Google product as your router you turn your combo router+router into a modem only.

Did you do that?

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More information
May 11, 2017 10:47PM PDT

I fiddled around with a LOT. When I first read up on how to make the Google WiFi router my primary router, I discovered that in doing so it would disable the TV part of my Frontier service. So I turned off DHCP and messed around until I got everything working. It's not just a bridge, but it's not handing out any Internet assignments either.

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Sounds painful.
May 12, 2017 7:03AM PDT

Just so you know, no one I know supports two routers in a row. It always has issues so unless we can turn the modem+router into a modem only, we won't tell them it will work right.

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It is painful!
May 14, 2017 5:56PM PDT

Yeah, that's my current bummer - I know it's not supposedto work like this, but I was hoping someone knew something I didn't. Turning my router into a bridge would fix it, but it would also disable our TV service. Turning the Google WiFi into an access point would fix it, but that would disable its mesh functionality. I was hoping there was a middle ground I could work with to get things spruced up.