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Forum Discussion
Inconsistency with Orbi Speed
Hi I've recently bought the twin Orbi router system and I have mixed feelings about it. I have seen the fastest speed I've ever experienced using it purely by speed testing it on my iPhone 7 i.e. 3...
Should I be disconnecting my satellite and doing some tests with just the router? Haven't tried this ! Hoping the guys at Netgear are reading these posts and a magical firmware update is in the works that solves these issues !!
I would definitely recommend taking steps to isolate whether the problem occurs when connected through just the satellite, just the router, or both, as well as trying different placement... process of elimination (which is what I THOUGHT I had done thoroughly enough, but the red herring of a good client to router speed and a good satellite to router speed caused me to overlook the router's placement as the likely culprit).
Disconnecting the satellite is one step you could take. My process was to prompt a connection to the main or sat by being near the desired unit and turning my WiFi off and on, because if you just walk over to one, if your device still has a usable connection to the other it will not switch, but turning WiFi off and on will result in it then connecting to nearby unit. Run a WiFi scan using Apple's Airport Utility (you need to enable this feature in the settings in order to see it), and determine the MAC address for each of the 2.4/5ghz bands of the satellite and the router, so that you can confirm which one you are actually connected to. I used an app called WiFi Sweet Spots to see the MAC address of the radio I was connected to (this app also supposedly measures link speed, but I found it to be quite inaccurate most of the time).
You may have a situation similar to mine, where your internet terminates at a specific location, restricting the placement of the router, but as I mentioned above, temporary power and data cables will allow you to experiment with moving it around just to see if that's a factor.
One other thing I discovered that could have played a role with my problem, behind a wall of this closet (about 1.5ft. away from the router) there's a flexduct run. As with the wire shelving, it's not in the path of the signal (at least not in the direction of the router), but presumaby the metallic outer layer of the flexduct behaves as a large piece of metal, and reflects signals around. Plus there's also the metal cases of an ethernet switch and a sercurity camera NVR. Again, these metal objects did not cause noticeable problems with a connection to a router in this location (the Orbi, Velop, and the R7800), but for some reason connecting through a satellite node was unreliable, which I can now only attribute to SOMETHING in or near this closet.