Intermittent internet connectivity outage with Orbi?

Mikey94025
Hero
Mar 08, 2017
adaptdabull wrote:
I'm having this same issue with or without beamforming on my Orbi with two satellites. Happens to my Dropcam Pro camera, and Nest Protect fire alarm (but perhaps other connected devices such as Hue lights and Wemo switches). This is unaccpetable. Just bought the router, and was enjoying it before seeing these issues, and may need to return.
Sorry to hear this - Yes you certainly can't live with that behavior. I'm surprised -- AFAIK the workaround of disabling Implicit Beamforming has worked for the Dropcam/Nest camera owners (and Ring). I myself have Dropcam Pro, Nest, and Nest Protect devices.

You can return or try further fiddling to find the difference. Have you upgraded to the latest firmware (though I don't recall any improvements/changes related to Nest camera disconnects)? You can also try different wifi channels. Others also disable MU-MIMO (but I never had to do that).
- alkizz
  Aspirant
  Mar 12, 2017
  My 2 cents - It's probably nothing to do with beanforming but QOS / WMM instead. I'll test some things out and see.
  - alkizz
    Aspirant
    Mar 12, 2017
    Playing around on the Orbi and the Internet.
    
    First, to restate the issue I'm dealing with and think most in this thread are too:
    
    1. Nest Camera randomly goes into an offline state. This means I cannot view live video and the camera is not recording. In other words, the camera loses connectivity to the Nest Cloud to upload live video.
    a. I have not noticed the camera dropping from the "Attached Devices" list on the Orbi but will confirm if this is the case or not (if it happens again).
    
    After some research,
    
    1. Beamforming doesn't make sense to me why it would cause random Nest Cam disconnects.
    
    2. WMM doesn't seem like it would be the problem either, because as far as I can tell it would only affect Nest Cam if it lacked QoS Standards (I refuse to believe it would)
    
    3. On my old nighthawk router, beamforming, QoS, Nest Cam, everything worked great. The nighthawk had many more settings for QoS than the Orbi but I don't have the nighthawk any longer so I am unable to confirm my previous settings.
    
    4. Once signing into an Orbi Router, you can still see some of the legacy settings pages if you know where to look. For example:
    
    5. I believe (only a hunch to be verified later) that the "Enable Upstream QoS" setting is the most likely culprit. On my Orbi that setting was turned on and the "Uplink bandwidth" Maximum was set at 512 Kbps. This means Orbi would be prioritizing upstream data packets based on (in my case) incorrect information.
    
    6. From Nest's support website here - https://nest.com/support/article/How-much-bandwidth-will-Nest-Cam-use - Nest Camera can at times use 1.2Mbps at 1080p Resolution - much higher than 512 Kbps
    
    7. I disabled Upstream QoS because changing the uplink bandwidth was not allowed (assume because its a legacy feature)
    
    8. Next steps are
    a. Wait and see if Nest Camera goes offline (happens several times per day since installing Orbi)
    b. Check if it's listed in the "attached devices" list on the Orbi
    1. if it's on the list then it could be reasonably assumed it never lost LAN connectivity and it's a Nest problem or a Orbi settings problem
    2. If it's NOT on the list, then back to the drawing board

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Intermittent internet connectivity outage with Orbi?