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Forum Discussion
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...
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!
Great solution.
Turning of the 5GHz SSID broadcast DOES NOT turn off the 5GHz radio! Disabling SSID broadcast is rather pointless - all it does it stop the router from announcing itsellf, but it DOES NOT prevent clients from still connecting to 5GHz. Some people do this for security (but its a placebo... no real security benefit from turning off SSID broadcast).
The ONLY method that I'm aware of to truly disable the 5GHz radio is the procedure I documented in post #2 on this thread. Once the 5GHz radio is disabled, your phone will have zero choice but to connect via 2.4GHz.
Devices remember the last wifi connection in there profiles. Thus will connect to the 5Ghz radio, even though the SSID has been hidden or disabled. We know this, however to get client side HW to connect to the 2.4Ghz radio, users have to tell the phone or pad to forget the current wifi network, then disable the wifi radio on the device then re-enable the wifi radio, then have the device re-connect to the SSID which will be only seen as the 2.4Ghz wifi radio. Input the password and the phone or pad will conect to the 2.4Ghz radios. This does work.
THIS WORKED! thanks
