NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
Feature Request: Orbi Satellite Ethernet Backhaul
As good as Orbi looks on paper I don't understand Y you would cut yourself so short and not support Eithernet backhaul for the satellites, I have 5 locations needing a system like this but without su...
Let me acknowledge that our customer base has been clamoring for this feature for a while, and we are trying to be responsive to their needs. To provide context on why it's taking a while to get it out, during the first quarter, the Orbi Engineering team was focused on bringing out the two new products (RBK30 & RBK40) to market. Now that it's accomplished, we're actively working on bringing this feature and a couple of other interesting, market-requested features to you.
Orbi Product Team
Thank you. This was informative on the Orbi. It seems to be lacking more features than I thought.
The biggest drawback of the ubiquity is that the wireless backhaul is using the wifi network and will slow down the base ssid. What Orbi brings is a separate wireless backhaul which is what I am looking for. I have friends running ubiquity using both wired and wireless backhaul. The band steering and the interface management is very buggy and the platform is slower than say a bunch of ancient apple airports. Actually Ubiquity offers nothing new compared to having Apple airports in bridge mode or as repeaters. The goal is to have the uplink wireless unit run at full wifi speed while serving the satellites.
Orbi's innovation is the separate channel backhaul. What we are asking for is also a wired backhaul to work in parallel and the ability to kick out dumb devices which get hooked up on one AP even when the signal has become weak which from what you are saying does not appear to be the case. I thought this was one of the key advantages of the APs. Ubiquity does this but very poorly from what I observed.
If Ubiquity not using wifi as their wireless backhaul then I would agree with you but so far I am only seeing the velop and the orbi offering this feature.
Again, I do not have wiring throughout the house. I have wiring at some places and not at others. This is the reason why I would like to have both so I can use wires where I can and wireless where I cannot instead of bogging down the whole house through a wireles only solution.
rhester72 Sorry if you don't understand and it frustrates you. I am using wired APs. They are not covering areas where I don't have wires very well or with repeaters reduce the speed of the AP the repeaters are connected to.
What we are asking for is also a wired backhaul to work in parallel and the ability to kick out dumb devices which get hooked up on one AP even when the signal has become weak which from what you are saying does not appear to be the case. I thought this was one of the key advantages of the APs. Ubiquity does this but very poorly from what I observed.
No Unifi does not do support that anymore (because it never worked right). Clients decide when they change, not the APs. Just like the Orbi.
Still trying to figure your explanation of what you want. You want wired to your Orbi router than out to a mix of wired and nonwired satellites? AFAIK, Orbi can only do 2 satellites. So you want one wired/ one wireless? If you have more than one wired AP now not sure how that is going to solve your problem.
Also not sure what you mean by the Unifi platform being slow. Are you talking about the controller? Are you talking about AP througput? The controller isn't slow. AFAIK the APs arent either.
Dan_H wrote:No Unifi does not do support that anymore (because it never worked right). Clients decide when they change, not the APs. Just like the Orbi.
Still trying to figure your explanation of what you want. You want wired to your Orbi router than out to a mix of wired and nonwired satellites? AFAIK, Orbi can only do 2 satellites. So you want one wired/ one wireless? If you have more than one wired AP now not sure how that is going to solve your problem.
Also not sure what you mean by the Unifi platform being slow. Are you talking about the controller? Are you talking about AP througput? The controller isn't slow. AFAIK the APs arent either.
Dan_H What are you saying Unifi doesn't support anymore? The minimum RSSI feature and the band steering feature are both still active in the latest AP firmware.
Dan_H wrote:What we are asking for is also a wired backhaul to work in parallel and the ability to kick out dumb devices which get hooked up on one AP even when the signal has become weak which from what you are saying does not appear to be the case. I thought this was one of the key advantages of the APs. Ubiquity does this but very poorly from what I observed.
No Unifi does not do support that anymore (because it never worked right). Clients decide when they change, not the APs. Just like the Orbi.
Still trying to figure your explanation of what you want. You want wired to your Orbi router than out to a mix of wired and nonwired satellites? AFAIK, Orbi can only do 2 satellites. So you want one wired/ one wireless? If you have more than one wired AP now not sure how that is going to solve your problem.
Also not sure what you mean by the Unifi platform being slow. Are you talking about the controller? Are you talking about AP througput? The controller isn't slow. AFAIK the APs arent either.
On unify:
1. On the "zero handoff". This is my understanding as well. It never worked right. And is dropped. My friend was struggling with how buggy it was.
2. My understanding is that the 2 satellite limit comes from the fact that it is limited to wireless. I sure hope that you could add more through wires. When multihop will be implemented, if it ever does, I actually hope to have a network architecture looking like this:
router -> 1 wireless satellite + 2-3 wired satellites -> 1-2 wireless satellites only on the wired satellites.
the router would manage the client handoffs from AP to AP.
3. The unifi APs are very slow, not the controller. All the tests I have seen and real life experience show that even the AC Pro give half the speed of the 3 year older Apple airport extreme which was already not considered fast. I regularly get 500-600MBPs at most locations on 5GHz only as I run separate SSIDs. My friend never gets more than 300MBPs on him 2.4/5GHz combined.
This review actually verified what I observed:
rafale7 You are correct that "Zero Handoff" is no longer supported on Unifi. This was a non-standard protocol that didn't work well and that required all APs to use the same channel (Similar to how Orbi works, by the way.) On unifi, this has now been replaced by the new fast roaming standard 802.11r.
rafale7 wrote:3. The unifi APs are very slow, not the controller. All the tests I have seen and real life experience show that even the AC Pro give half the speed of the 3 year older Apple airport extreme which was already not considered fast. I regularly get 500-600MBPs at most locations on 5GHz only as I run separate SSIDs. My friend never gets more than 300MBPs on him 2.4/5GHz combined.
This review actually verified what I observed:
I have not experienced the Unifi APs to be slow. That review is almost 18 months old. The following review is 30 days old, and shows the AC-PRO to provide 611 Mbps and to be the fastest tested. They also tested the Linksys Velop.
https://www.custompcreview.com/reviews/ubiquiti-unifi-ap-ac-pro-wifi-access-point-review/38030/
and this review shows the unifi products dont match the orbi in coverage wise
Yeah the orbi covereage is better. So it needs the wired backhaul feature like discussed.
Forgive my skepticism of non comparative reviews. I base my assessment on real life, multi client comparison and have concluded that ubiquity is a very nicely managed network with subpar hardware design. The AC Pro AP barely achieves more than half the speed of the Apple airport AC. Yes the interface is nice and is full of great ideas which is the reason for all the hype around the "professional wifi solution" but really not competitive in terms of throughput compared to older hardware.
If you want to compare more similar AP's to Orbi, then the Unifi AC HD would be the one closest to the orbi specs and speed.
The orbi is pretty damn good at solid wifi, it just needs wired backhaul to take advange of the ports.
Now even Amplifi are going to offer wired backhaul why does Netgear always have to play catchup after taking the lead? Competition always see to fly past Netgear even if Netgear starts ahead, just poor feature set and slow Firmware release plagues Netgear everytime they put out something promising, Orbi still has a lot of potential but features Must improve wired backhaul is one of them now every competitor is offering it!
Wait, how can Amplifi impliment wired backhaul with the wirless mesh Nodes? They don't have wired ports. Sure the router can do wired connections, thats not exactly what we mean by wired backhaul.
Or did they release new hardware?
It does sound odd on the Amplifi...
To feed on the discussion I actually have all 3 setups which was suggested to compare and ran a few tests.
I am in an environment where I have setup a single AP with 15 wireless clients on that AP. One is a IP cam streaming at 6Mbps all the others are a mix of 2.4GHz or on 5GHz AC or A/N. The mix is the same through the test. Using iperf 2 on a macbook pro (3x3 5Ghz), all tested on the same channel and environment I have gotten the following results:
Apple Airport Extreme AC with the signal at -51dB varies from 520Mbps to 590Mbps
Ubiquity UAP AC Pro signal at -54dB varies from 350 to 400Mbps
Orbi single unit as an AP with signal at -49dB varies from 500 to 560Mbps
Pros and Cons:
Apple Pros: High speed in multi client environment, single interface. Rock solid stability and compatibility.
Apple Cons: Future support, no mesh, no dedicated wireless backhaul, no band steering/AP steering.
Ubiquity Pros: Controller interface offers a lot of options. Band steering, AP steering. Good stability
Ubiquity Cons: Relatively poor performance (coverage and speed). Verified on ubqt forum than cumulative bandwidth for 10 simultaneous clients is expected to drop to 300Mbps. I am observing 600Mbps+ on the old Airport. Best case peak single client is to reach 600Mbps (Vs 800+Mbps = gigabit ethernet limit for Airport). No dedicated wireless backhaul (repeaters would have even worse performance). Has some compatibility issues with specific devices
Orbi Pros: High wireless speed and range. Dedicate backhaul meaning little/no performance degradation from satellite . Strong signal (though might not be good for speed).
Orbi Cons: No wired backhaul. Stability concerns from reports. Limited interface options.
Pretty disappointed overall by Ubiquity but there is hope in Orbi. I think having more than 2 wireless satellites per base may degrade performance of the satellites making the wired backhaul even more important for locations which have that option.
Yes all were using VHT80 channel. Performance wouldn't be able to reach above 400Mbps without it. And no guest network. My set up has a separate SSID for 2.4GHz though and it was set exactly the same to make it a drop in replacement. I spent some time on the ubqt forum and it is pretty consistent with what others have observed there. Even if all the devices are 2x2 you will see significantly lower performance with multiple clients compared to Apple. In a "connected home" the single client performance is useless since we are to expect 5-20 clients per AP. ubqt own data showed aggregate throughput to be very limited in multi user environment and are releasing the HD with a 4x4 radio at a whooping $350 a piece to improve it. If it was $150 I would have considered it but not at $350.
That being said I am considering changing my setup to increase range and if possible speed and I have to say, ubqt is not the answer. Both speed and range are reduced dramatically. It could be that the LR has higher range but being a 2X2, it would be a downgrade for speed. The major problem seems to be the processing power of the unit.
The controller was a pain to install on ubuntu server and took a lot of community help/try and error to get to work but is very attractive, informative and functional so I understand the hype.I am just very disappointed by the hardware performance and can only say there is a lot of overhyping going on.
Peak Single client
AC Pro: ~600Mbps
Airport AC: ~820Mbps
Can see here:
I don't have the 10 client stress environment to compare to this dataset but my low 15 client test shows:
AC Pro: ~450Mbps
Airport AC: ~600Mbps
Note also that these are not peak throughput. I am actually 15ft away one floor down from the AP for these tests.
peteytesting wrote:
st_shaw wrote:Thanks, rafale7. I'm surprised you could get 600 Mbps from so far away. I've read that Apple is discontinuing their WiFi APs though. Strange, since they seem to perform well.
financial decision based on how much they would make on routers etc v how much they make on phones and tablets
Yeah. Seems like it's getting harder and harder to find high-performance products anymore. People don't want to pay for it. The phone market is also making it harder to find high performance electronic components like accelerometers and magnetometrs.
Indeed. The rumor is that the development team from Apple's router have been reassigned to the AppleTV product. It means no new product or developments in the foreseeable future but when I look at the market offering and the development in the past 4 years, I can see why. There isn't any significant breakthrough. Their 4 year old product is still competitive and and a lack of innovation/differentiation means lack of revenue $.
And note that the Orbi is not too shabby. It is actually pretty close and far ahead of the ubqt. The hardware is good. Software/firmware needs some work which is the opposite of ubqt. The single biggest differentiation is the 1.7Gbps wireless backhaul which can feed a satelitte broadcasting at 1.3Gbps (+450Mbps at 2.4GHz). The 5GHz AC radio itself, the ethernet ports and the processing power are all there. Just need to make it run right. Netgear has the right idea.
I think UAP AC's concept is a wired mesh with weak APs compensated by numbers and having them work in concert coordinated by a separate controller and router. It appears to have been designed for 2x2 devices with low throughputs. Each AP, having more of them, would then have to handle fewer clients and needing less bandwidth. The issue I see with this is the intrinsic bandwidth of each AP is too low and not future proof. The new HD really is adding more processing capability more than the extra antenna and radio giving the abilty to handle more throughput.
If netgear could make the orbi router the controller and each satellite having the ability to connect wirelessly to one other satellite and wired to the router. Or be connected to the router wirelessly, you would get the most flexible and powerful wireless platform. For now, I guess I am returning all the new gear.
Router --- (wireless backhaul) --- Satellite
|
|
(wired backhaul)
|
|
Satellite --- (wireless backhaul) --- Satellite
|
|
(wired backhaul)
|
|
Satellite --- (wireless backhaul) --- Satellite
|
|
etc...
Some of you are mixing up two of Ubiquiti's products. The Amplifi is their mesh system. The UAP AC is part of their Unifi lineup of wired Access Points; they have no mesh capability.
TheEther wrote:Some of you are mixing up two of Ubiquiti's products. The Amplifi is their mesh system. The UAP AC is part of their Unifi lineup of wired Access Points; they have no mesh capability.
and just confuse things even more there is now unifi mesh
In My case, I did not confuse the products. I was just using the word mesh inaccurately.
What I meant by it was to say that the APs are able to talk to one another and steer devices to the AP with the highest signal which the unifi can do and.
The Orbi is really not a mesh network neither.
rafale7 wrote:What I meant by it was to say that the APs are able to talk to one another and steer devices to the AP with the highest signal which the unifi can do and.
The Orbi is really not a mesh network neither.
this can only happen if the clients are capable of understanding and moving , most devices / clients arnt compatible with that standard yet
correct orbi is a distributed wireless system , not a mesh system
peteytesting wrote:this can only happen if the clients are capable of understanding and moving , most devices / clients arnt compatible with that standard yet
If you are thinking of 802.11r, iOS has supported it for quite some time. It also supports 802.11k and 802.11v. source. Android, I beleive, has supported it since Lollipop. source
correct orbi is a distributed wireless system , not a mesh system
I know you understand what Orbi is, but this distinction may be too subtle for some to understand. This picture may help others.
The Orbi uses the setup on the right, with the base station in the middle. A true mesh system (i.e. one that supports 802.11s) is on the left.
