Anyone else have a problem with band steering and the equipment?

If you have 2.4 and 5GHz split into 2 SSIDs then your modem is NOT performing band steering.

Band steering is when the SSIDs are the same and the modem sees a device with 5GHz and it gives said device 5GHz.

I would highly recommend you factory reset the modem by holding the little red button for 20-30 seconds. And see how it works with the SSIDs un-split and all the other settings back to default that you may have changed.

Correct, I know what band steering is. Because it's not working correctly or well, I have since split the networks into two.

Factory resetting the equipment is a temporary solution and results in the band steering issue I mentioned. The tech also suggested to leave them at all default settings after a factory reset and the next Saturday another tech came out and diagnosed the issue as being with the band steering and replaced the equipment. The issue still exists. Once i get everything "working," it lasts maybe a week at most.

Any idea on the upload problem?

What speedtest are you using? 

Are you using just one or are you using a few of them?

Are you noticing the 1mbps upload during lets say uploading something to Google Drive etc? Or do you not notice it being slow and it's just when you speedtest.

Heard about a repair a co-worker did this week where there was 1mbps on a Gigapower account. He changed the server the test was pinging on speedtest.net and that seemed to be why. Wondering if this is a similar situation, hence why I am asking if you're using more than one speedtest site / different servers on the various sites. 

While I can't say much on your speed issues, I will tell you that band steering is a joke. I have a 5268ac gateway and after a day I find all my devices revert back to 2.4 anyway. If I turn the 5GHz band off, my Wi-Fi light then turns off. A reboot puts things back on 5GHz, but only for less than 24 hours. Hope that helps...

You can download the latest Pace 5268 firmware from here:
»68.250.244.11/firmware/0 ··· 28-PROD/

And then manually install it:
»192.168.1.254/upgrade       

Forums → US ISPs non-cable →     go to DSLReports.com and look for that topic in the forms 

AT&T U-verse → Possible New Gateway - BGW210-700 (3x3 2.4 GHz / 4x4 5 GHz)

You can see the software has been updated

Exactly! Same thing here. I changed them to two different SSID's so that I can control what's going on.

Everything has seemed to level out once I set up two different SSID's for the two bands. The band steering seemed to always get everything stuck on the 2.4 band daily, which was quite frustrating. I was using the speed test suggested on the router's speed test page, which is speedtest.net. For my location in Atlanta, the server it selected strangely enough was an AT&T one. Only when using the AT&T server on speed test did I get a 125 Mbps download and >1 Mbps upload. Once I changed the server to anything other than the AT&T server, everything seems to be correct. Not sure what the issue is there. I would use speedof.me instead for anyone testing their internet speeds. This site goes through passes with different file sizes of uploads and downloads to give you the most accurate reading. For some ISP's, large file sizes result in throttled speeds such as streaming for example. That does not seem to be the case for AT&T.

There’s a reason you have problems with band steering: AT&T instructs people to make sure the 2.4G and 5G network names and passwords are the same so they can throttle customers down.

They tell you that you need to keep it the same so you can “benefit from the enhanced Wi-Fi technology on your device”, since it’s “designed to provide improved in-home Wi-Fi performance”. And it sounds reasonable at first blush. After all, who wouldn’t want the benefits of improved performance?

But as with everything else pertaining to near monopolies, any lip service they give you touting better service for you is to mask that it is really all about benefits to them. And the benefit to them is, less bandwidth saves them capital expense. That’s why my iPad, which was only a few feet from the gateway and thus wasn’t out of range of 5G at all, got pushed over to 2.4G. They were hoping I would not notice the difference, and save a few pennies on me.

And so, there you go. There’s your real reason for “band steering”. Your only hope is to make your devices “forget” your 2.4G band, or to not allow devices to connect automatically to it.

I had this problem with the band steering ATT modem. It was driving me nuts with slow speeds. FInally, an ATT repair guy, working with his supervisor, figured it out. We logged into the router. There, we changed the name of the 5 Ghz network name to be different from the 2.4 Ghz network. I then saved the settings and the router rebooted. I then connected to the new wifi name. This forced the Wifi to the 5 Ghz network. Problem solved.

So now I have two wifi networks to choose from when I connect a wifi device for the first time. I called one "myWifi2-4" and "myWifi5". I connect to the "myWifi5" for laptops and phones. This is the 5 Ghz band. However, for things like smart TVs and other household internet devices, I use the 2.4 Ghz Wifi.

The tech told me that a smart TV should be on the 2.4 Ghz network but my laptops and all other devices should be on the 5 Ghz network. It appears the band steering technology does not work so well.