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Forum Discussion
I Give Up, Returned the RBK53
That’s it. After years of connection issues and promises of improvement with firmware upgrades only to be left waiting for another firmware upgrade to fix the previous issues , I decided to return the...
I would second the fact that there is something fundamentally off about the Orbi firmware.
I still love the hardware and no other router/mesh comes close in performance when the system works fine.
However the way the firmware distribution is managed + the inherent bugs in the code base (I presume) make the experience far less positive than otherwise.
My initial setup a year ago took over 2 days of trubleshooting before I got it stable
Adding a new satellite a few weeks ago broke a lot of things and took almost a week of hit & trial to get things back to normal (Eventually settled by setting Orbi as AP , downgrading firmware to 2.1.something and blocking internet access to all Orbis - to prevent auto updates)
Oh, and each time it reboots (say after a power failure), the whole network takes severeal minutes to come up and hours to fully stabilize. Short Brownouts and blackouts are fairly common in my town and I had to eventually move the Orbi power to a small UPS to avoid this
I think there is a lot more happening on the layer 2 switching on the Orbi than what happens on a traditional router and something about it is off
superczar wrote:I would second the fact that there is something fundamentally off about the Orbi firmware.
I still love the hardware and no other router/mesh comes close in performance when the system works fine.
However the way the firmware distribution is managed + the inherent bugs in the code base (I presume) make the experience far less positive than otherwise.
Please keep in mind that the only firmware pushed to users automatically are ones with major revisions. All others are up to the users. May not be a 100% fool proof system, but if your network is working and you login to the router and see that a update is 'available', shouldn't you ask yourself..."why?", unless you like living on the edge and particiapting in NGs new beta test group.
- In my case I had zero intent or wish to go to the latest firmware.
When adding a simple extra satellite broke my existing LAN, I had to go through a 100 hoops ( including updates to a minor non push revision) before finally settling on a forced downgrade to 2.1.4.16 ( and assigning static IPs to the Orbis + blocking internet access to them) to get things working.
On a side note, I have gone through plenty of home networking equipment over the last almost two decades. Enough to lose count of but there is none that I have seen that’s so capable yet so problematic