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Forum Discussion
Internet Speed Drops Suddenly
I have an Orbi Router and Satellite running the .34 firmware. My Wi-Fi Smart TV, work laptop, Android phones all work perfectly fine. My Windows 10 laptop, though, does not. It connects just ...
Last update on my situation. Hopefully someone will find the information useful. Also that Netgear tech support make note of it.
As noted above, my wife's laptop was having the same slowness, but even worse than mine was.
I installed the Netgear USB card into her computer and instantly the problem went away: it ran at full speed, the speed never dropped and seemed rock solid for the 3-4 hours she was online (testing for work at 9:00 pm -- boo!)
So it appears that at least that's some sort of answer. The 802.11n card I had did not seem to work too well. The 802.11ac card resolved it.
Our laptops are getting old and we're talking about upgrading (I'm dying for a Microsoft Surface) but for now a $30 network card upgrade buys a few months.
I read the following review on Amazon last night and thought it miight be helpful to some here.
"A very sleek looking system that NOW gives me a reliable and fast internet connection throughout my four-story townhouse.
I downgraded one star because I almost sent the system back. When I first set it up, the connection would go dead every twenty minutes or so. The online forums, both Netgear's and independent ones, included posts from others with similar experiences and various convoluted solutions that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.
I decided to call Netgear, and the patient customer service person walked me through a fairly simple solution that I thought I should share here. As with most computer hardware when first hooking it up, step one is to update the software, which seemed to work perfectly. However, it turns out that the automatic update worked only for the base module and NOT the satellite, which has separate software. This mismatch of software releases apparently caused the intermittent dropping of the network. After manually loading the satellite software update from the Netgear website and installing it, the system worked flawlessly, and has ever since.
It would have been helpful for this to have been explained somewhere in the materials sent with the product, but of course nowadays you get virtually no documentation at all."
Thanks for posting.
I received an email from "emarketing@e.netgear.com" on 1/31/17 explaining the issue you describe along with a remedy.
"We have found an issue where the auto firmware update for your Orbi satellite might not complete properly"
Interesting.
That doesn't seem to be the problem here as the problem went away with the upgraded NIC, but that's definitely something that anyone watching this thread will want to check out.
Thanks.
We have an older Lenovo gaming laptop (guessing its around 4 to 5 years old now) thats been updated to Windows 10 that had built in 802.11N 2.4GHZ only wifi that did not play well with Orbi (and Linksys Velop as well, I test a lot of Wifi gear and then setup stuff for friends and family). I am not sure what it is about some of these newer Routers and Whole Home Wifi systems, but this particular laptop would drop speeds all the time, just lose internet connectivity every couple minutes to an hour, where you had to click to turn wifi off, then back on manually to get internet access back, or just straight disconnect and reconnect erratically sometimes.
At some point, you have to try something else, and I got a simple AC450 nano adapter that isn't a problem leaving in a usb port on a laptop all the time (think same size as a logitech unifying usb receiver). And its working like a charm. Bonus on the particular nano adapter I got is one, its cheap, and two, its 5 Ghz only, so its not even able to switch to 2.4 Ghz, which helps with troubleshooting. It connects consistently at its top speed 433 Mbps on the network (its usb 2.0 so 480 would be its ceiling anyway) and when the network is quiet, I see all of my alloted internet bandwidth show up on speednet tests.
Now I got my eye on another new Nano usb 3.0 adapter that is AC1200 802.11AC Wave 2 MU-MIMO capable that I want to try out with the Orbi and Velop.
Interestingly, my laptop is also a Lenovo. And the solution was the same: a new NIC.
You (and others) have mentioned two problems:
- WI-FI connectivity slowing down.
- WI-FI connectivity dropping completely.
I strongly suspect that the second one is a symptom of the power-saving features of most laptops that can turn off the WIFI card to save battery. I've routinely turned this off and I think that's why I don't see it that particular issue. I also suspect that the drivers for newer cards are much more intelligent about this (I'll admit that the pwer saving is at least partially managed at the system level, not the card level, so I'm just spitballing here) and may be part of the reason the dropping problem goes away with the upgrade.
Anyway, excellent information. I had trouble finding anything on this issue, which is why I started this thread. I think it will be helpful to the next poor schmoe that comes along.
