Orbi firmware update v2.1.4.16 availability

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XeroFire wrote:

RBK50 Windows 10 PC

 

I just updated to firmware V2.1.4.16 last night, and it hasn't resolved my problems at all. Both wired, and wireless devices are constantly dropping connection, everything from a roku 4 premiere, to to both my Wife and I's iphone 8 plus, to chromebooks, to ipads. This has been an ongoing issue for several weeks, requiring sometimes HOURLY reboots of my orbi system. In order to reconnect my iphones I constantly have to hit the "renew lease" button in order to be correctly assigned an IP address by the router. None of my other routers by other brands have EVER had this issue, but this one has been happening intermittenly since I purchased the Orbi over a year ago. I know its a firmware issue, and when the orbi works properly, its awesome, but I'm just about done dealing with this, especially because of the extortionate Netgear support policy. 90 days? What kind of BS is that for a modern consumer product. If you have faith in your products, you should be standing behind them for at least a year. And to make it just about impossible to talk to someone beyond that 90 days is also wrong. Oh, and in case anyone is interested, I did contact support within the 90 days, they sent me a new orbi, claiming the hardware was defective (it wasnt) and when the new one had the exact same issue, they did spend time running diagnosics on my network, checking the logs etc, and were eventually able to get it working with a beta firmware patch, but it took 2 weeks to get that far. Now I'm at the mercy of beta firmware being developed for people who hopefully are having the same issues that I'm having. Sorry for ranting, but really tired of dealing with this and listening to my family complain about not having consistent internet access when I spend over $300 on a supposed top of the line mesh system.

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Assuming that you've tried a full factory reset with both Orbi units, and have manually restored your configuration, I have kind of a wacky idea to throw out. We have iPads here (couple of iPad Pro 10.5"'s), and I have an iPhone 8, as well as a Samsung S9. My wife has an iPhone 7. Couple of Samsung "Smart" TV's *smile*, couple of desktops and a laptop, and so on. We also had a Roku Ultra that was fine (since returned, but worked fine while we had it), and also Fire TV's and it all works well with the latest Orbi firmware. What I'm saying is that other than Chromebooks, we have pretty much everything that you've mentioned, and it all works here.

I'd suggest taking various clients off the wireless, and then the wired clients, one at a time, until things stabilize, and see if you can figure out which one(s) are misbehaving. Or if not misbehaving, at least behaving in a way that the Orbi isn't handling properly.I wouldn't worry about the Apple hardware, iPhones and iPads, anyways, I doubt if they're problematic with the Orbi, I'd be looking particularly at odd, one-off sort sort of hardware, maybe an iot item, some home automation or surveilance cameras. But you never know, you should find out which client(s) are acting up if you're patient enough. The important thing is to only change one thing at a time, so that when things go off the rails, you'll have an idea what cause it. If you can figure out which client(s) are causing all the disruption, that might help you figure out which direction you want to go in. This should be a short term thing, shouldn't take long.

You could also do the opposite, of course, turn off everything that uses wireless, and verify that things are stable with just wired clients first. If your network with just wired clients on it isn't stable, then turn off your wired clients and add them back in the same way. If you haven't found the problem yet, add each wireless client back, one by one, looking at each one's effect on your network as it's added to the clients you've already added. Hopefully you could figure out which clients are responsible for the mess on your network. Keep in mind, it could be more than one client that's out of control.

Just a thought....

You're not alone. I was using my iphone last night and I noticed i lost internet, it was connected to WiFi but said it had no internet connection, I noticed my son was streaming netflix on the apple TV still though. I had to turn WiFi off on my iPhone 6S Plus and turn it back on, and all was fine.