My Experience with Arris TG1682G Gateway

Hi All, just want to share my experience with Arris TG1682G gateway.

Summary: TG1682G gateway wireless speed is not very good.  Set the gateway to bridge-mode and used my own router; significant difference in wifi speed. If you have issue with TG1682G wireless speed, definitely try with your own router.

Background: The wifi speed and connection is most important for our family.  Computers, TV, Apple TV, iPad, cellphones are spread out in different rooms on wireless network.  I only have 1 device connected by wire.

I was using my own Arris SB6141 cable modem forever.  And at start of Covid work/school from home, we had problems with wireless speed and router locking up due to significant increase in zoom/webex usage.  So I got a Netgear RAX45 AX4300, which is Costco version of RAX50 AX5400.  It works great.  Internet speed: 50Mbps.  Wifi speed 60Mbps (download) in most of the house; 40Mbps in the farthest part of the house.

Unlimited internet: We have being struggling trying to keep our internet usage under 1.2TB per month.  We were watching streaming on low to medium quality, so not really enjoying content on high quality.  Another issue is gaming.  Most games are 30-70GB download.  And updates can be 5-20GB.  So just trying 10 games will require 500-700GB, which is half of our monthly data.  The 1.2TB cap is quite ridiculously.  So we just upgraded to XFi complete with unlimited internet.  Don't really care for the XFi complete features; just want unlimited internet.  I was told we have to upgrade to gateway from Xfinity, which is Arris TG1682G.  

Data: I compared TG1682G gateway only versus TG1682G in bridge mode (modem only) + Netgear AX4300/AX5400 router.  Note my internet speed is 50Mbps.  It is not very fast, but sufficient for our needs.

TG1682G wireless:

• In same room as gateway, just 10 feet away. 5GHz and 2.4GHz both have around 35Mbps (download).  Not bad, but not great.
• Once I move to adjacent room, 30 feet away.  5GHz performance is still consistent with slight drop 30-35Mbps.  2.4GHz performance varied a lot and often dropped to 10-15Mbps.
• And if I move to the furthest part of the house.  2.4GHz performance drop is quite significant: inconsistent and dropped to 2-8Mbps.

•  If all your devices support 5GHz, it might be ok.  We do have older devices that do require 2.4GHz.

TG1682G bridge mode + Netgear router:

• Most of the house: 5GHz and 2.4GHz are both at 60Mbps (download).
• Further part of house: 5GHz still at 60Mbps.  2.4GHz drops to 40Mbps.

I checked wifi signal strength of the routers.  The signal from TG1682G is quite strong.  It is around 0-10% lower than my Netgear router.   They differ by only 0-5 dB out of 40 to 60 dB (depending on location).   I cannot say the speed difference is just signal strength difference.  TG1682G already starts off slightly slower even next to the gateway.  And speed drop is significant over distance, especially in 2.4GHz band.

Routers were on auto channel selection.  This is the mode I would operate in anyway.  I can see that Netgear and Arris TG1682G picked different channels.   I didn't try to manually change and test channels.  It is very time consuming and often it is not clear if another channel might be better.  There are signals from more than 10 neighbors' network; they have varying signal strength over different over-lapping channels.  If I look at the channels selected, it seems neither Netgear nor Arris picked the best channels.  I cannot say if Netgear tend to pick better (less crowded) channel than Arris and if that cause the difference in speed.

I definitely recommend you to test your set up with your own router.  A $150 router will provide much better performance than TG1682G.  One downside is the XFi complete features, which do not work in bridge mode.