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Forum Discussion
Installed Orbi and data usage quadrupled!
I purchased and installed an RBR50 AC5000 with a Satellite RBS50 on July 5. It worked great. I had much more coverage for our house/property and all our devices were able to connect from everywhere and get better coverage. We have 4 people (2 adults, 2 kids). There's Xbox, Nintendo Switch, 2 laptops, iphones, ipads, roku tvs with sling and netflix (cut the cord years ago), thermostat, apple airport expresses, etc. I think at any one point in time there are about 12-15 devices connected. Anyway, with comcast/xfinity my data usage for the last 6 months with this same device list has been 470GB, 473GB, 590GB, 593GB, 691GB, 744GB (July, first month with Orbi), and 2188GB (this month!!). WTH! Comcast has a cap at 1024GB, above which it costs $10 per 50GB. They give me 2 courtesy months, and obviously I've used the first. Problem is our consumption habits haven't changed that much to account for an extra Terabyte and a half! Sure, this was the last month of summer when the kids are home, but I would expect it to be more in line with June and July (~700GB), not nearly quadrupled for 1 month! I feel I'm left with couple options after reading a bit here to try to figure this out and solve the issue:
1. Fire up my older replaced router (Netgear WNDR3700v4) and try to install DD-WRT or something like that to try to pinpoint which devices are consuming all this data. Unfortunately this expensive Orbi setup can't even tell me that (just overall date usage). That's a big pain as it doesn't seem that easy to flash some 3rd party firmware on old hardware and then run it for a month to determine high data culprits. Lots of time and effort...
2. Try and find out if the Orbi firmware I'm running has something to do with the extreme usage. I've read a couple posts here about people complaining about similar issues and a few saying a fix for them is reverting to an old firmware version. I'm currently running firmware version 2.1.4.16. Does anyone know more about this or have suggestions how to revert to old firmware? I'd almost rather try #2 first before all the time and effort #1 would take. Suggestions on which firmware version to try?
Thanks!! Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!
57 Replies
I've seen other threads about this same issue. Variously, people have determined that things like iPhones determining the bandwidth was now sufficient to support VoIP calling, higher res Facetime/video streaming, infinite loops for checking for updates (both the Orbi itself, and also other devices on the network, malware, etc. It is sometimes the case that, on a busy network, switching to the Orbi has improved the throughput to individual devices such that they begin doing something they didn't used to do previously on the old router. The best way to check the true cause and source/destination of the increased usage would be to put a monitor between the modem and router (or connected to the router and setting one of the LAN ports to mirror all traffic, though that might not include the router's own traffic and only client devices' traffic). Alternatively, leaving the Orbi conneted with no client devices, checking usage, and then testing one device at a time to identify the cuprit.
Basically, several people on these forums have wrongly attributed increased usage to their Orbis when, in fact, it was another device whose behavior changed after switching to the Orbi, which they discovered after additional troubleshooting.
And yes, if the Orbi is on the lastest firmware version, but wrongly thinks it is running a previous version and is repeatedly downloading the current version and sucking up data, resetting it and manually reinstalling the firmware again may resolve that issue so that it correctly identifies which firmware version it's running and stops "updating" itself with the same version over and over.
randomousity wrote:
I've seen other threads about this same issue. Variously, people have determined that things like iPhones determining the bandwidth was now sufficient to support VoIP calling, higher res Facetime/video streaming, infinite loops for checking for updates (both the Orbi itself, and also other devices on the network, malware, etc. It is sometimes the case that, on a busy network, switching to the Orbi has improved the throughput to individual devices such that they begin doing something they didn't used to do previously on the old router. The best way to check the true cause and source/destination of the increased usage would be to put a monitor between the modem and router (or connected to the router and setting one of the LAN ports to mirror all traffic, though that might not include the router's own traffic and only client devices' traffic). Alternatively, leaving the Orbi conneted with no client devices, checking usage, and then testing one device at a time to identify the cuprit.
Basically, several people on these forums have wrongly attributed increased usage to their Orbis when, in fact, it was another device whose behavior changed after switching to the Orbi, which they discovered after additional troubleshooting.
And yes, if the Orbi is on the lastest firmware version, but wrongly thinks it is running a previous version and is repeatedly downloading the current version and sucking up data, resetting it and manually reinstalling the firmware again may resolve that issue so that it correctly identifies which firmware version it's running and stops "updating" itself with the same version over and over.
Hey our resident experts said install newest firmware and reset would fix this issue.
You'll need TM working to ensure whats going on first. Hopefully NG will get TM fixed.
