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Forum Discussion
RossBev
Dec 28, 2017Follower
HOW TO DISABLE 5G TEMPORARILY ON ORBI ROUTER
HELLO, I own an Orbi system and recently obtained a Personal Weather station that does direct uploads to various weather sites online. The weather station will only connect to Wi-Fi via a 2.4GHZ sys...
guzzijason
Dec 28, 2017Apprentice
There seem to be a number of people having the same sort of issue lately. I believe the older firmware let you power off the radios, but the recent firmware does not. You can manually disable a specific interface on the command line, but there is an autmated watchdog process that will bring it back up again, usually within seconds.
I did work out a hacky way of temporarily downing the 5 GHz interface that might work for you:
- Shut off your satellites (otherwise, you need to repeat the following steps on all of them, in addition to router)
- Enable telnet on the router (from the /debug.htm page of the web interface)
- telnet to router
- After loggin in, run the following comand script on the command line (yes, 1 big line):
seconds=60; x=0; while [ $x -lt $seconds ]; do ip link set down dev $(config get wl5g_NORMAL_AP); x=$(( x + 1 )); echo "down $x"; sleep 1; done
This command will determine the interface for the primary 5 GHz, and shut it down for 60 seconds. If you want to change the amount of time that the interface stays down, simply change the "seconds=60" part of the script to whatever you want.
This doesn't make any permanent config changes, so if worse comes to worse, simply reboot the router and you should be right back to where you were.
Good luck!
ChihSiang
Feb 09, 2018Aspirant
Hi, can i use this method to disable the 5hz band permanently?
- guzzijason2Aug 24, 2018Guide
I missed this question before, but no - it is not practical to try and use this as a permanent solution. There is some sort of watchdog process on the Orbi which is constantly checking the status of the interfaces, and bringing them back online if they happen to be shut down. This workaround fights against that watchdog, but you really wouldn't want to do that long-term.
ChihSiang wrote:
Hi, can i use this method to disable the 5hz band permanently?