Visitor

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2 Messages

Friday, August 29th, 2025

Internet speed from certain device regresses several times a week until gateway is rebooted

My issue is pretty much exactly as described in this post: https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/your-home-network/how-often-do-you-have-to-restart-your-xfinity-gateway/65babafd56dae762b6880ba3.

Basically, several times a week my internet speed will be noticeably slower on my laptop only (speed < 25Mbps) and then I'll reboot my gateway and I'll be good (~50Mbps <= speed <= ~100Mbps) for usually anywhere from a day to a few days. Sometimes the speed regresses within hours. During the slow down periods I do notice that the "connection type" in GeForce NOW shows that I am connected to my gateway on the 2.4GHz band rather than 5GHz (and then once I reboot the gateway and reconnect I'm usually back on the 5.0GHz connection thereafter)... but I have no control over this as I only have the 1 home network, not distinct networks under "2.4" and "5.0" suffixed SSIDs.

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Accepted Solution

Visitor

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2 Messages

1 month ago

Resolution
Even though the root cause hasn't necessarily been resolved (seemingly some mysterious interference in my apartment...?) I was able to drastically improve my performance in GeForce NOW from my laptop by using the "split bands" feature on my gateway to essentially force my laptop (or whatever devices I choose to stream from) to connect to my gateway on the 5GHz band exclusively. I've provided @XfinitySean's response with instructions on how to set up split bands in the Xfinity app:

Most definitely! You'll find steps to change your WiFi name and settings through the Xfinity App here. Once you're on the screen that allows you to edit your WiFi name, you'll also see an option that says "Split Bands" which will allow you to change the name of each individual radio band. I've personally done the same as I have a few devices that can only connect to a 2.4GHz radio band. I ended up simply adding "2.4" to the name, so other devices in the home will stay connected to the 5Ghz band. Let us know if that helps!

Remarks
Just for additional clarity, my specific issue was that I was unable to maintain a consistent enough speed to play games on GeForce NOW due to my gateway's default connection strategy which dynamically switches between the 5GHz and 2.4GHz radio bands based on specific conditions. After I've taken certain remedial actions (e.g.: restarting my gateway, updating windows and restarting my laptop, enabling random hardware addresses on my laptop and reconnecting to wifi, etc.) I would usually find myself connected on the 5GHz band and experience speeds which met my expectations initially. However, at some point (whether it was a day, a couple hours or, even more recently, mere minutes after the fact) my connection would be affected by some kind of transient interruption (e.g.: I may observe a sudden, inexplicable loss of packets accompanied by a significant latency spike in GeForce NOW) and then from that point on my laptop's connection would be permanently "stuck" on the 2.4GHz band until I perform one of (or perhaps a specific combination of...?) the temporary remediation steps I mentioned before. Splitting the bands across 2 separate networks and enabling my laptop to connect to the 5GHz one exclusively gives me the outcome I need to proceed generally without difficulty. However, there are still some unsolved mysteries:

  1. What could be the root cause of the inevitable transient interruption event which always triggered the band switch without fail?
  2. Why after the initial switch to 2.4GHz does my connection never seem to return to 5GHz until I manually intervene?
  3. Why has this only now (within the past month or so) started to become an issue for me? Is the dynamic band selection feature new?

If there are possible answers to these questions then great but if not it's no big deal. In any case, I am now able to maintain consistent enough speeds for GeForce NOW (bar any occasional transient events) so we can probably mark this as resolved.

Official Employee

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2K Messages

2 months ago

Hello @user_4qeuf0, Thanks so much for taking a moment out of your day to leave a post on our community forum and we would be happy to help. If you could send our team a direct message with your full name, the name listed on the account (if different), and the service address associated with your account, I'd be more than happy to look into this for you. To send a Direct Message, please click on the chat icon in the top-right corner of the screen, next to the bell icon, and then type or select "Xfinity Support" to initiate a direct message.

Expert

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114K Messages

2 months ago

@user_4qeuf0 @XfinityChelseaB 

Please circle back here and post any possible solutions for the issue here in these open public forums so that all readers here may benefit from the exchange / info. This is in keeping with the spirit for which these public help forums were originally intended. Thank you.

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