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Forum Discussion
Orbi WiFi speeds drop low until I reboot the router
Dear All, I have the following Orbi mesh router with 2 satellites running the latest firmware v.2.7.3.22: Netgear Orbi Mesh Router RBK53S-100NAS (router + 2 satellites) Router Product Model: RBR50...
While your response is welcome, it's not useful for this particular known issue, where speed is normal but then drops to a low value (usually 30~45Mbps) days later and stays at that low speed until a reboot. Many people have reported it. It's a problem with the router. It appears to be tied to one of the devices on the wifi network, my theory is it's connecting to the backhaul path. In my case it was a NETGEAR wifi dongle. I reconfigured it and the problem hasn't returned.
fmalloy wrote:
my theory is it's connecting to the backhaul path. In my case it was a NETGEAR wifi dongle. I reconfigured it and the problem hasn't returned.
The malfunctioning device is not likely to have connected to the backhaul path. The 5G WiFi backhaul link uses WPA2 encryption the same as the front facing 5G WiFi. The 21 character SSID is hidden (not broadcast) and the password is a 63 character string of random letters & numbers. I suppose it could have interfered with the backhaul link in some way. (generating thousands of management frames?) but connecting seems a bit of a stretch.
If download speed is degrading over time and is restored by rebooting the router, that does argue for some device or process that is consuming bandwidth at an increasing rate and leaving less (and less) for other devices. It would be fascinating to know what that dongle was doing (technically). There are very few tools available to non-technical users to diagnose this sort of problem, which leads to the idea of "disconnect things until the problem goes away."
I am seriously annoyed that OpenWRT, which Orbi is based on, includes software to report the data used by each device and somehow Netgear did not include that functionality in their Orbi product. I am not 00% certain that the culprit would be revealed by the data reports, but it would be a good place to start. (I see reports that packets that are handled entirely by firmware acceleration do not make it into linux stats. WAY over my head.)