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Forum Discussion
CAUTION: Orbi's Wifi Guest Network does not really isolate guests from main network
I was just playing around around with the Guest Network in Orbi and made a rather disturbing discovery that guest clients don't seem to be separated totally from the main network, in fact can access ...
Talking free here my friend : The situation is not acceptable, neither for Orbi nor for the Orbi Pro. It's simply bad design bottom up if your engineers wanted to avoid a proper implementation of VLANs. There are industry standards I do expect Netgear to follow - and this are clearly VLANs. There is nothing that stops Orbi and Orbi Pro from having a tagged WiFi trunk and a tagged backbone. If your engineers don't agree, I'm willing to proof that such a setup using standard Netgear equipment is possible. Your competition does support properly isolated, dedicated networks, including guest networks - without dirty L2 tricks and introducing new problems. I am very disappointed Netgear is unable to convert Orbi and Orbi Pro design to industry standards. My expectation is that Orbi and Orbi Pro - in any mode, in any mixed backbone design - can work and co-operative with industry standard switches, access points, and even wireless extenders. I can't get rid of the impression that there is a team of engineers who is riding the wrong horses. Proof enough how poor, no bad the Nighthawk product line does behave for many users - exactly built on the very same L2 hack design. And of course the Nighthawks lack of interoperability options with Orbi and Orbi Pro, too. And last but not least, the pricing of the often named competitor is aggressive, while Netgear is much to expensive for a product line which is a hack. Not a solution. We can't use Nighthawk, Orbi, and Orbi Pro to design and deploy as any kind of a solution today. Insight is a possible option, but lacks of a security appliance and state of the technology art Wireless APs. Not having all these devices able to interoperate is a big mistake. Interoperability is only possible by implementing industry standards. Doing anything different must be rejected as a business case. As such the Orbi system has - in its current state - nothing to do on Insight. Can't be a guest network is not the same like a guest network or like yet any other SSID/VLAN defining a network for a certain purpose.
Sorry to object Schumaku, but I completely disagree with you.
Orbi and OrbiPro are some of the most advanced physical layer, link layer and protocol layer network product implementations I have been associated with in my 35 year career at four networking companies. The Fast lane 3 architecture is the result of nearly one hundred man years of development, including trial versions which never saw the light of day.
We set out with the single-minded purpose of creating a distributed LAN and WLAN solution which could be deployed reliably by a networking novice.
That is exactly what Orbi achieved. In independent test after independent test, Orbi beats all competitors in coverage and delivered bandwith. That is amazing because very few of these tests actually test what Fast Lane Three technology is actually exceptional at and that is fully loaded networks. What you don't really appreciate with essentially all of the industry tests you will find, is that these distributed wifi solutions not really taxed when you only have one or two clients walking around doing speed tests. If that was the only application that these would support, then it wouldn't have taken years to develop this solution.
The reality is that wifi solutions, even in the home are bombarded by dozens of connections from handheld clients, to video displays, to IoT cameras and sensors. What you don't see is how competitive solutions fall down when their backhaul (which is shared with random endpoints) gets conjested because every single packet is traversing it twice. But the fact that this is the most advanced solution of its type on the market is not what makes Orbi unique and perfect...it is the fact that it is so simple to turn on and use by networking novices.
I will concede that there are home networks with VLANs (My personal experience is maybe 1 in 100). Certainly there are small businesses that are build upon discrete network architectures. But neither of these two applications was the target for Orbi or OrbiPro. Netgear has an wide selection of business, commercial and even individual user WLAN solutions which are ideal for these deployment cases. The Insight WAC510 is a great example of a product which for roughly $100 US provides wave 2 11AC solution which could easily provide the capabilities you are looking for and support remote cloud management as well.
As I mentioned, the Orbi architecture is one of the most advanced networking solutions I have been associated with in my career and it is roughly one year old. The product is doing band steering, active client roaming, signal optimization and trying to offer thousands of square feet of coverage, with out a site survey, band programing or manual signal strength tuning. We continue to learn more and more about the challenges of implementing an autonomous self-optimizing WLAN ecosystem in a world where certain mobile phone providers and video adapter developers regularly release clients with novel wifi behavior. We are firmly committed to this architecture and continue to invest in improving the customer experience.
While you might disagree with our attempt to target this particular customer segment, which you are clearly not a member of, I wanted to make sure you understood who we are targeting the product at and why we made the design tradeoffs which we did.
John
John,
with the explosion of IoT, do you really think it is not a feature that people should have in home and small business routers? Network segmentation may be something that is most used in the enterprise, but a light bulb or thermometor should not be on the same VLAN as my PC.
The number of complaints, the amount of issues with this technology, the lack of support for 802.11q VLAN tagging, and the number of community members suggesting to install competitive routers from a different brand - replacing Orbi, Orbi Pro, Nighthawk does speak it's own language.
The feedback from the community does not seem to work.
johngm wrote:
While you might disagree with our attempt to target this particular customer segment, which you are clearly not a member of, I wanted to make sure you understood who we are targeting the product at and why we made the design tradeoffs which we did.
Well, dear John,
- Users continue to disagree with the tradeoffs since our agreement to disagree - being on Orbi (yet another customer returning an Orbi product as posted these hours), and
- Orbi and Orbi Pro users have massive problems when combining wired and wireless backhaul (something that must simply work transparent and automatic), and last
- we find that Netgear has pushed the similar tradeoffs to the Insight business router (BR500) where the specs clearly don't match the implementation: Claiming to support 256 VLAN but in reality there are just four, where all must be untagged LANs, and just one VLAN per port, so with four LAN ports it is just supporting for VLAN with four subnets and dedicated DHCP only - ways off the specs, ways off the capabilities of the Insight switches and wireless access points.
I'm still convinced things could be done properly by using industry standard technology with tagged VLANs on designated ports. It's all about proper documentation and communication. For the Insight routers this is undoubted a must, for the Orbi Pro a proper solution was promised, while Orbi customers are left behind. Every industry standard Linux router with iptables plus some support software is ways ahead. And afraid, the L2 routing technology in place has massive performance problems in combination with QoS and connection logging - that's why we have to guide your customers to disable useful features when they have high speed Internet connections in place (like 1G or 10G which are industry standard in more and more markets), otherwise the router performance is badly impacted. You can find this not only in Orbi or Orbi Pro, but much more prominent on the Nighthawk routers, too.
And all this is not helpful for promoting the Netgear brand products.
