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Forum Discussion
Orbi Best Connection setup
I just bought the 3 satellite system and set it up as a wireless system as i thought was supposed to, but i live in a newer house that has ethernet jacks in every room and was wondering what the bene...
There are folks here that will tell you that you dont need the Orbi and should have just bought a bunch if individual access points and set them up with the same SSID to create roamable wifi coverage.
I have a similar wired network to you but I opted to replace my old access points because they are underpowered by modern standards and I wanted the single management interface of the Orbi. I found there were features of the Orbi that I had not anticipated like the ability to plug a wired device into a satellite. I simplified my wired network by leveraging that feature for some low bandwidth devices like printers in the more remote parts of the house.
I set mine up initially using the default wireless backhaul with an option to plug them into the wired network if I had to. I am very early into this experience but even with my 60 ft long house the satellites had no problem connecting to the router in the center of the house and on the floor below.
I have now cut over the whole house to the Orbi, over 30 wifi client devices in addition to the wired devices (FIOS router, NAS, old non-wifi devices etc).
On my second day with the Orbi and still waiting for the proverbial to hit the fan.
Is there any benefit to wiring the satellite to the ethernet port speed wise or does it not really matter, i bought the $499 3 sat 1 router setup for 8,000 sq feet and only have 5000 sq to cover but want any advantage i can gain
As a general rule if you have the correct cabling (cat5e or better) and a Gigabit switch to connect things up the ethernet backhaul would in theory be at least as fast and less prone to interference. I took the approach that it was a new feature perhaps with bugs and quirks and if the system worked with the wireless backhaul I would use that first and fall back to wired if I had problems.
I can stream a movie from a NAS server to a client device connected with wifi to a satellite connecting to the router over its wireless link and my Internet speedtests from that same client are the same as a speedtest on my wired gigabit network so my ISP (Fios) is the main bottleneck in my system.
- All my wiring is cat5e and I have 1GB speed as well as a gigabit switch but if I don’t need it I’ll just use wireless, just didn’t understand why everyone is so excited about Ethernet backhaul
Certainly if you have a very large house where the wireless backhaul is impossible or unreliable (too much distance, too much structure, too much wireless noise etc) then the ethernet backhaul would be a valuable option to have.