@Anonymous User
Hope you don't mind me butting in on your thread but personally I wouldn't get hung up too much on comparing the sticks and how they report things. They will be on different firmware and it could just be as simple as Roku changing how they report signal strength. My stick is tucked behind an amp at the opposite side of the house from the router and often varies between reporting a poor and a good signal but it doesn't affect watching NOW TV content, it's not how strong a signal it receives but whether it receives sufficient packets to stream the content reliably that counts. Even the fact that you've now stuck the two sticks next to each other is going to confuse things - it's not ideal to have two wifi devices right next to each other, or too close to the router.
You had a buffering problem the other day, how are things now? Is the new stick still buffering whenever you watch something or is it streaming fine even though it reports a poor signal? Is it just NOW TV the buffering happens on or is it affecting other apps such as BBC iPlayer?
It wouldn't be unusual to get an occasional period of buffering regardless of how strong a signal reported as your own network isn't the only factor in play, but it shouldn't be happening often. Rebooting your broadband router is the first thing I would do in such a situation.
Not to be blunt but I could suggest all sorts of things to try but you'll not know for sure if I'm helping or hindering or making no difference whatsoever, with wifi devices things can often just start working or start buffering for no apparent reason (so many factors affect things and radio waves are invisible!).
However if the stick clearly isn't working consistently I can only agree with the idea to get an exchange and see how things pan out with a new device.
PS MAC numbers should be different - they are unique to each device and are used by the network to differentiate between devices.
