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debit72's avatar
debit72
Follower
Aug 03, 2020

Satellite speeds with AC3000 and different providers

I bought the Orbi AC3000 a few months ago. At that time I had a cable internet provider. I would get about 230Mbps down with devices connected to both the router and the satellite -- almost no speed difference between the two.

About a week ago I switched to a gigabit fiber connection. A computer hardwired to the router gets nearly the full 1000Mbps speeds. However, the satellite is maxing out around 450Mbps. I'm using a wireless backhaul.

I'm just curious why the cable was able to get similar speeds at router and satellite, while fiber the satellite speeds are half.

Is there anything I can change about the settings? Or is it just a limitation of the wireless backhaul?

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  • CrimpOn's avatar
    CrimpOn
    Guru
    Aug 03, 2020
    debit72 wrote:

    Is there anything I can change about the settings? Or is it just a limitation of the wireless backhaul?

    Although the promotional (advertising) material for the Orbi system touts the 5G backhaul as "up to 1733mbs", like much advertising material it is technically correct, but it is also not representative of actual performance.  Place the satellite three feet away from the router, and the backhaul will be tremendously fast, but the net effect will be worse than having no satellite at all because it will totally overlap the coveage area of the base router.

     

    To see the actual WiFi transmission speed between router and satellite, activate telnet on the router using the debug screen, then log in and type this command:

     

    satelliteinfo  wifi

     

    My satellite is one floor down and about 25-30 ft. from the router.  Here is what the Orbi reports:

     

    root@RBR50:/# satelliteinfo wifi
    {
    "mac address" : "A0:04:60:xx:xx:xx",
    "hop" : "1",
    "bridge mac" : "A0:04:60:xx:xx:xx",
    "backhaul conntype" : "5GHz",
    "backhaul rssi" : "-71",
    "backhaul macaddress" : "A0:04:60:xx:xx:xx",
    "backhaul phytxrate" : "975",
    "backhaul phyrxrate" : "780",
    "backhaul parentmac" : "A0:04:60:xx:xx:xx"
    }

    Notice that the bit rates are substantially less than the theoretical maximum possible 1733.  WiFi has considerable "overhead" compared to ethernet.  There are beacon frames every 100ms, preambles, potential interference from other WiFi systems, etc. etc.

     

    Getting 450mb at the satellite sounds pretty good to me.