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Forum Discussion
Severe bufferbloat/wifi lag with Orbi (recent)
Hello, I've had the Orbi since early summer, most of the time it works well, but the past few weeks I've been noticing severe spkies in network lag and after running a number of tests on dslreports.c...
I've called my ISP (Charter) tech department and literally no one knows anything technical about any of this stuff. They've scheduled a "tech" to come out and look at the cable box and modem but I'm sure they won't know a single thing about this stuff either.
So if this is an outside home issue, I'm screwed. I did see that the firmware on my modem is slightly old and Netgear suggests called my ISP to have them update but Charter Spectrum says they cannot and will not update anything outside of their own equipment. So now I'm stuck in a black hole because Netgear says to update the firmware on your modem, call your ISP and when I call my ISP they say they don't do that.
I also tested with the direct connection to the modem and the dslreports.com data showed an F for bufferbloat. I returned my Orbi and reverted to my old Apple Airport Extreme system, so basically returned to the pre-Orbi state. Then I updated my modem from the existing Motorola SURFboard SB6120 (DOCSIS 3.0) to a new MB8600 DOCSIS 3.1 modem. This seems to have fixed the upload bufferbloat. The results are still very bad for download, but as guzzijason pointed out to me and you, that seems more like the check engine light of bufferbloat tests, with no way to tell what's contributing upstream. Anyway, my non-scientific conclusion (polling the gamers in the family) is that the upgraded DOCSIS 3.1 modem helped. I'll be back on the trail of an improved router soon. I have no way to say, but I wonder if the ability of the Orbi to improve the connection speed on the end-node systems just exposes (and makes worse) the bufferbloat problems that were already present *without* the router. If so, then I'm hoping the DOCSIS 3.1 modem upgrade fixed the real problem as well as possible and a speedier router will not expose the problems again.