NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
My Orbi RBR40 (FW v2.7.4.24) runs speed tests automatically too frequently
I've discovered that since my ISP increased the bandwidth of my plan, I'm running at -- and have exceeded once -- the data cap that they impose. After much digging and trudging, I see that my RBR40 i...
Excellent question and it has triggered a thought. Yes, it's that grafana. It's in a Home Assistant instance. It gets the data from the Traffic Meter feature of the router, which is coming from the Netgear integration with HomeAssistant. Your question made me think about that so I started digging through their docs. This bit is especially interesting, particularly the note of warning at the end of the paragraph. I know that I disabled the downlink and uplink entities long ago, but I don't remember doing anything with the ping entity. So, if that's still enabled in HA, then the integration is still running the full speed test every 2 hours. I may be taking an extended lunch break to head home and verify if any one of those 3 entities are still enabled and if so, I'll disable it and unblock access to speedtest.net. Assuming that 1) I don't see a spike in network traffic every two hours and 2) the last updated field in the Admin pages of the Router management remains unchanged, then I think we've found the culprit. It's also interesting to me that the HA integration might be updating the last run time value of the Speed Test results page in the router's management tool -- but if it's a true integration and invoking speed test as offered by the router, then it makes sense. If this is the issue, which won't surprise me at this point based on those docs, my frustration with lack of configuration flexibility persists, but will have moved from the Netgear product to this 3rd-party integration with the product. I'll share updates here hopefully later today when I get hands-on with it to check the state of the 3 named entities that would trigger the speed test.
I've had multiple orbi's and even the RBR40 version you have (and its running at a friends right now).
None of them have ran schedules speedtests. I logged in remotely and checked just to make sure.
Makes me suspicious that something else is going on.
What makes you point it to the orbi? Whats telling you its running every 2 hours?
Have you tried a factory reset?
What modem/gateway is it connected to?
I track the data usage via Grafana. I see a spike approximately every 2 hours. I cross reference the time of the spike to the time reported on the Speed Test page in the admin console (web pages) of the Orbi and the spike correlates precisely to the last time the speed test reports having been run. The Speed Test page has a button to manually execute the test and the test results and the time the test last ran. It has no schedule to manage the execution.
And your modem/gateway?
I'm with plemans. Something else is going on. Netgear has no reason to run speedtests that the user does not initiate.
What about the modem / gateway? They would have less reason to run the tests than the router. I have done searching through the forums before starting the discussion. Most responses related to speed test discrepancy between the router and the modem, which is not the issue I’m having. I’ve seen a few that mentioned the reason for the tests was to maintain QoS between the router and its satellites, which I can somewhat wrap my head around except for the inability to configure the frequency of execution.
The primary reason for suspecting the router is that the SpeedTest page in the advanced section of the admin console shows that the test was last run at the same time as a spike in the data consumption. I suppose it’s feasible that the router is somehow tracking the results of another entity’s execution of the speed test, including the results of the tests, but that seems unlikely to me.
I've never seen the router run scheduled tests. If it truly is, try factory resetting the router and reinstalling it.
Again, I've never seen that and I've ran the RBR40, RBR50, RBR750, RBR960, and RBE971. Plus the MK93. and numerous other netgear routers. None of them have ran scheduled speedtest. I've actually seen it as a suggested idea as some users (without data caps) want to track consistent speeds directly on the router.
JamminJimmy wrote:
I track the data usage via Grafana.
This Grafana? https://grafana.com
What platform is Grafana running on?
How does it collect data?
Excellent question and it has triggered a thought. Yes, it's that grafana. It's in a Home Assistant instance. It gets the data from the Traffic Meter feature of the router, which is coming from the Netgear integration with HomeAssistant. Your question made me think about that so I started digging through their docs. This bit is especially interesting, particularly the note of warning at the end of the paragraph. I know that I disabled the downlink and uplink entities long ago, but I don't remember doing anything with the ping entity. So, if that's still enabled in HA, then the integration is still running the full speed test every 2 hours. I may be taking an extended lunch break to head home and verify if any one of those 3 entities are still enabled and if so, I'll disable it and unblock access to speedtest.net. Assuming that 1) I don't see a spike in network traffic every two hours and 2) the last updated field in the Admin pages of the Router management remains unchanged, then I think we've found the culprit. It's also interesting to me that the HA integration might be updating the last run time value of the Speed Test results page in the router's management tool -- but if it's a true integration and invoking speed test as offered by the router, then it makes sense. If this is the issue, which won't surprise me at this point based on those docs, my frustration with lack of configuration flexibility persists, but will have moved from the Netgear product to this 3rd-party integration with the product. I'll share updates here hopefully later today when I get hands-on with it to check the state of the 3 named entities that would trigger the speed test.
What platform is Grafana/Home Automation running on?
