iPhone won't hop to satellite?

Well, spent a good 4-5 hours with this last night and I just couldn't get any of our iOS devices to reliably hop from the router to the satellite. Tried all possible configuration settings that could affect this (including reducing the power on the router so it wasn't pushing out at 100%, fast roaming, MIMO, beaming, etc.), as well as a lot of different physical setups, and nothing seemed to work (consistently).

On top of that, compared to my old ASUS AP, I was only getting about 80% of the bandwidth I was getting before. Swapping the Orbi out and the ASUS back in, I was back to getting full speed. So, definitely some overhead on the Orbi that results in a loss of speed. I could live with that, if the hopping to satellites worked reliably, but since I couldn't get that to work, it didn't matter.

Some observations I did make, though, during all of this testing (as I had a MacBook with me the entire time and was monitoring everything via the web interface)...

• Totally understand that this could just be my situation and may not reflect the performance of the Orbi system for others (plus, as I deal with wireless networking as part of my day job, I may look at things/notice things a little more than the average user, especially when doing testing/comparisons vs previously recorded data of the system I'm replacing).

• Before I did any of the testing, I manually scanned the area and ensured that my 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands had zero interference. I'm lucky in that my neighbourhood is pretty clean and there's not a lot of interference/competition from neighbouring devices and I'm able to select both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz bands that have zero overlap. As well, I did a quick heat map of the main floor/area I was testing and SNR was a-ok, so no issues there.

• Reduced bandwidth/speed was a result of the Orbi hardware, not environmental conditions.

• I don't know if this is just a GUI error, or what, but I constantly found the satellite was connected to the router via 2.4Ghz? This surprised me because I thought the satellites connected to the router via a dedicated 5Ghz band for backhaul? So, not sure why it was showing as it being connected at 2.4Ghz?

• When running speedtests from my phone, and monitoring wireless AP connections on the laptop, whenever I noticed poor performance, it'd coincide with my phone having dropped the 5Ghz connection and having jumped to the router via 2.4Ghz.  Turning wifi off/on would result on the phone reconnecting to the router via 5Ghz and performance would increase significantly.

• My phone would hang onto the 2.4Ghz connection to the router forever, and never hop to the satellite. I would walk out to the garage...to the extreme edge of the connection, and the phone would just stay connected to the router at 2.4Ghz. Up/Down speeds at this point would be close to zero. Or, if I continued to walk, I'd loose wifi altogether. But again, turning wifi off/on would result on the phone finally connecting to the satellite via 5Ghz (or, sometimes 2.4Ghz) and performance would increase.

One thing I really wanted to test was completely disabling the 2.4Ghz band so I could test just with the 5Ghz band, but, even though screenshots of old firmware showed the checkbox to turn off 2.4Ghz (via Advanced Wireless Settings > Enable Wireless Router Radio), this option wasn't available in the latest firmware I was running. The only option I had was to disable SSID broadcast, but that didn't do what I wanted.

And because of the above, combined with the Orbi forcing the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz to share the same SSID, there was absolutely no way I could test on just the 5Ghz band (well, aside from telnetting into the router and setting different SSIDs via the command line, but by the time I got to that as an option, I'd resigned to the fact that I wasn't getting anywhere).

Anyway, I think I gave it a good go and put the system through the gears. But, for me, I just couldn't get it to perform. Having to manually turn wifi off/on to force the jump between router and satellite, the limited bandwidth/range of the router itself [way more dead zones vs my old AP] and constantly finding myself on the slower 2.4Ghz connection are all dealbreakers. So, unfortunately (as I really wanted this to work), I'm going to have to return the RBK30 and go back to my old two-SSID setup (at least with the old setup, we know we get full coverage throughout the house via the main AP, and by lowering the output power on the main AP, there's a pretty consistent auto-jump between the main SSID and the secondary SSID when we go out into the backyard...even though the connection isn't "seamless" in terms data being handed off between the two APs...but that's not really much of an issue for the most part).

I might consider the RBK40, so I can test again with the full-on satellite (vs RBW30), and a dedicated ethernet backhaul, but at that price point, I'm getting into Velop territory. The RBK30 was just a sweet entry point, so had high hopes for it (especially for family/friends).

Thanks,

Kristin.