RBR50 is constantly dropping connection wirelessly after a factory reset and firmware upgrade

I had a similar problem recently, which seems to be resolved now, for going on 24 hours. I just posted a response to someone else who also seems to have the same issue here.

It seems that anything that was peer-to-peer, or, possibly, where the IP address had already been resolved, continued working, whereas anything requiring DNS name resolution failed. I was already on the current firmware that you just upgraded to when my problem began. I'm still unsure of the exact problem, but it seems to somehow be related to DNS queries passing through the satellite. I don't know if the satellite just stops passing on the DNS requests to the router at some point, if the router fails to resolve them, if the router fails to pass along the resolved IP address, or if the satellite either doesn't receive or pass on to the requesting device the answer, but the problem appears to be something along those lines.

Recommend trying to factory reset the satellite, pair it with the router again if necessary, and see if that resolves it, to avoid the hassle of a factory reset of the router, which is what I ultimately ended up doing. I haven't had any problems for going on 24 hours now, but it's a pain to reconfigure everything.

What is the distance between the router and satellite(s)? 30 feet or more is recommended in between RBR and RBS to begin with depending upon building materials when wirelessly connected.

Try setting manual channel 1, 6 or 11 on 2.4Ghz and any unused channel on 5Ghz.
Any Wifi Neighbors near by? If so, how many?

Try disabling the following and see:
Armor, Circle, Daisy Chain, Fast Roaming, IPv6 and Set 20/40Mhz Coexistence to 40Mhz only. Set Short preamble instead of Long preamble modes. Save settings and reboot the router and satellite(s).

One User Experience/Configuration:
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi/Most-Stable-Orbi-Configuration/m-p/1941087/highlight/true#M97026

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Mattack27 wrote:

I'm having a situation where my Orbi RBR50 crapped out a couple of weeks ago (no connection, couldn't log onto the device any longer) for an unknown reason, as nothing in my setup had changed. I had to preform a complete factory reset, and when rebuilding it I installed the latest firmware upgrade RBR50 (Orbi Router) Firmware Version 2.7. 2.104.

Since this reset I have had to, sometimes four or five times a day, had to restart my router because it randomly drops out wireless connections.  A couple of  strange thing are: 

1) most of the time my wired connection stays connected to the internet when this happens.

2) the wireless connections that are CURRENTLY connected and streaming on the internet, such as zoom class, or tv streaming, usually do NOT lose connection either, and fully maintain their streaming connections, even though the orbi app says there is no internet, and any new connections (sometimes even from the same computer, i.e. streaming in Zoom, but unable to open a google search in a browser) simply don't connect to the internet.

3) I have plenty of time on my dns lease.

4) the only thing that has changed in my setup is the latest ios app and the latest firmware. device location to number of devices has not deviated.

 

So far rebooting the connection via software or by unplugging the power correct the problem temporarily, but invariably I must reboot again.  This has happened close to a dozen times today now, which is why I'm finally writing.  This router has been working over the last year almost flawlessly so this is a dramatic turn for the worse!

 

 

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I had the exact same problem and fixed it by reverting back to firmware V2.6.1.40.

Just an update, though not a very satisfying one. I followed the advice to reset the satellite, and that didn't seem work, so I turned the satellite completely off, which seemed to stabalize things for a couple of days and just when I thought I had the culprit, I had a few similar drops on the base unit. After a couple of days longer I figured that if I'm going to have random drops until I have time to try another suggestion, I may as well have better coverage, and I turned my satellite back on.  I haven't had a new drop since. This has now been stable for about a bit over a week. I'm totally doubtful the situation is in any way "solved" but I'll roll back the firmware if it starts to happen again and keep this thread  updated if there are any changes in the near future.