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Forum Discussion
Streaming from network devices stops due to constant DHCP lease renewal?
I've had nothing but trouble with the orbi system but mostly we have battled to a stalemate. The one remaining thing I can't tolerate is constant dropping of streams from Apple TV, Amazon Fire sticks...
I am seeing the same exact issue - with constant dhcp ip issuing and clients continuously dropping from the network. And my newest macbook pro willl not reconnect, and occassionally other macbooks, iphones and ipads suffer the same issue. We don't have many heavily used, non-ios clients, but my canon printer hasn't been able to be used without restarting it, either. I've also tried all sorts of various options and placements, and am stuck, and frustrated because it disrupts business video calls and demos all the time! We have a 5000 sqft home and have tried R-S-S daisy chain and S-R-S configurations, with no improvement. I'll have a day or two with no issues, and then mornings like just now where it dropped almost a dozen times within an hour.
I do notice that sometimes I'm connected to 2.4 and sometimes 5, though I don't know if it constantly flip-flops back and forth. I'll watch for that. Maybe I'll try to force the 5 connection only either through the clients or the router, and see if that stabilizes things.
What FW is currently loaded?
What is the Mfr and model# of the ISP modem the NG router is connected too?
What is the distance between the router and satellite(s)? 30 feet is recommended in between them to begin with depending upon building materials.
What channels are you using? Auto? 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:
MIMO, Daisy Chain, Fast Roaming, IPv6 and Set 20/40Mhz Coexistence to 40Mhz only. Save settings and reboot the router and satellite(s).
If you updated to recent FW v.210, try enabling Daisy Chain. Some have mentioned that this seems to be working in reverse order, enabling means disabled actually for R-S-S.
lizabny wrote:
I am seeing the same exact issue - with constant dhcp ip issuing and clients continuously dropping from the network. And my newest macbook pro willl not reconnect, and occassionally other macbooks, iphones and ipads suffer the same issue. We don't have many heavily used, non-ios clients, but my canon printer hasn't been able to be used without restarting it, either. I've also tried all sorts of various options and placements, and am stuck, and frustrated because it disrupts business video calls and demos all the time! We have a 5000 sqft home and have tried R-S-S daisy chain and S-R-S configurations, with no improvement. I'll have a day or two with no issues, and then mornings like just now where it dropped almost a dozen times within an hour.
I do notice that sometimes I'm connected to 2.4 and sometimes 5, though I don't know if it constantly flip-flops back and forth. I'll watch for that. Maybe I'll try to force the 5 connection only either through the clients or the router, and see if that stabilizes things.
FURRYe38 wrote:
V2.2.1.210What FW is currently loaded?
ISP is Spectrum Charter, and modem is Arris T1602AWhat is the Mfr and model# of the ISP modem the NG router is connected too?
What is the distance between the router and satellite(s)? 30 feet is recommended in between them to begin with depending upon building materials.
router to sat1 is 57', router to sat2 is 42', sat1 to sat2 is 52 - I've tried several different configs, this is just where they're at right now.
auto on 2.4, and 48 on 5. mac scan shows 11 is best for 2.4 and it is currently on 8, so I'll change that. 161 is best for 5, but that's not an option through the ui, and I haven't been able to telnet in to change it as instructed in some post.What channels are you using? Auto? 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?
Of course, yes. My strongest RSSI via the mac scan comes in at -74 and shows three bars where I am scanning from in my office. There are seven others, strongest at -85 (two bars), weakest at -94 (one bar).
done (noting that ipv6 was already disabled, and based on note below and that I'm on .210, I left daisy chain enabled) I'll check back in a day or so with updates on these settings.Try disabling the following and see:
MIMO, Daisy Chain, Fast Roaming, IPv6 and Set 20/40Mhz Coexistence to 40Mhz only. Save settings and reboot the router and satellite(s).
I'll run this for a day or so, and may switch daisy chain to see if that helps/hurts. ditto for fast roaming.If you updated to recent FW v.210, try enabling Daisy Chain. Some have mentioned that this seems to be working in reverse order, enabling means disabled actually for R-S-S.
I've also been reading and trying the things at https://windsorwebdeveloper.com/making-netgear-orbi-great-again/ up to this point, and have dropped the 2.4 signal to 25% (I want to discourage 2.4 swapping) and 5 to 75%. And I've set my mac network hardware mtu to 1453. I may stop making so many changes or reset and do some things one at a time, if I have time to further troubleshoot once the system is stable.
Thank you for your help!lizabny, ekhalil:
Thanks for replying and sorry you're seeing it too.. you're both describing 2.4GHz to 5GHz changes but I actually now suspect it's the router deciding to go from 20Mhz wide bands to 40Mhz wide bands and vice versa within the 2.4GHz network. Usually, 40Mhz wide bands are a bad idea in a crowded Wifi environment. What netgear seemingly is doing is looking for noise and if it sees a network nearby it switches to the more narrow 20MHz band. It could also be both 20<->40Mhz switching and 2.4<->5GHz switching though... who knows. Part of the problem is that the orbi doesn't actually log enough about what it's actually doing to be able to know.
There is a setting in the advanced page to turn off the adaptive switching but I don't know if that means it sticks with 20 or with 40MHz wide channels or if you can choose... I'll have to investigate tonight.
I'm starting to think this is the main issue.
lizabny:
Regarding your printer, I did have a printer issue before and it was due to the orbi allowing usage of channel 14 or something that the printer didn't support. I explicitly set the value on the orbi to not use that channel and it fixed it. You can perhaps search the forums for it.
FURRYe38:
I hope NetGear is paying you to be a 1st tier customer support because that's basically what you're doing here. It would be nice if they were more active. That being said, one thing a customer support person would do is encourage people to open their own threads to discuss instead of dropping the same debugging info which restarts a new conversation in the same thread. Just because someone says 'I'm having that issue too' doesn't mean it's acutally the same issue and it gets confusing reading 3 or 4 issues in one thread. It's also hard to point to it later as a solved thread.
Anyway, I mean that as advice and not a criticism. I appreciate that you're trying to help everyone here.
OK just to confirm the help page within the admin console says:
Enable 20/40 MHz Coexistence
Disabling this option allows your 2.4GHz wireless to stay in supporting the max speed. Enabling this option may reduce the max speed of your 2.4GHz wireless to the half when there is another wireless network detected in your environment; this is to avoid inteference between wireless networks and to get along with other wireless networks in the environment.
I also confirmed it with a WiFi scanner. So that's not great. It seems like there's no way to set it to only use 20Mhz wide bands and stay that way. You're stuck with constantly switching or being a bad neighbor.
That being said, disabling this setting seems to have made things better in terms of Apple TV dropouts. I'll report back if it continues to happen.
Keep us posted on how it goes. Hope something helps. Streaming should work well.
lizabny wrote:
FURRYe38 wrote:
V2.2.1.210What FW is currently loaded?
ISP is Spectrum Charter, and modem is Arris T1602AWhat is the Mfr and model# of the ISP modem the NG router is connected too?
What is the distance between the router and satellite(s)? 30 feet is recommended in between them to begin with depending upon building materials.
router to sat1 is 57', router to sat2 is 42', sat1 to sat2 is 52 - I've tried several different configs, this is just where they're at right now.
auto on 2.4, and 48 on 5. mac scan shows 11 is best for 2.4 and it is currently on 8, so I'll change that. 161 is best for 5, but that's not an option through the ui, and I haven't been able to telnet in to change it as instructed in some post.What channels are you using? Auto? 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?
Of course, yes. My strongest RSSI via the mac scan comes in at -74 and shows three bars where I am scanning from in my office. There are seven others, strongest at -85 (two bars), weakest at -94 (one bar).
done (noting that ipv6 was already disabled, and based on note below and that I'm on .210, I left daisy chain enabled) I'll check back in a day or so with updates on these settings.Try disabling the following and see:
MIMO, Daisy Chain, Fast Roaming, IPv6 and Set 20/40Mhz Coexistence to 40Mhz only. Save settings and reboot the router and satellite(s).
I'll run this for a day or so, and may switch daisy chain to see if that helps/hurts. ditto for fast roaming.If you updated to recent FW v.210, try enabling Daisy Chain. Some have mentioned that this seems to be working in reverse order, enabling means disabled actually for R-S-S.
I've also been reading and trying the things at https://windsorwebdeveloper.com/making-netgear-orbi-great-again/ up to this point, and have dropped the 2.4 signal to 25% (I want to discourage 2.4 swapping) and 5 to 75%. And I've set my mac network hardware mtu to 1453. I may stop making so many changes or reset and do some things one at a time, if I have time to further troubleshoot once the system is stable.
Thank you for your help!Well, over the weekend I used the AppleTV quite a bit and didn't see connections drop. This means I'm going to consider the fix to my streaming issues to be the setting of 20/40Mhz Coexistence to 40Mhz only at least for firmware V2.2.1.210. If you also have this problem, I'd suggest you try that first.
Note that:
- 40Mhz is not great and Netgear should really make it so it can be set to 20Mhz only rather than 40Mhz only.
- Netgear should also actually fix whatever bug causes it to drop when switching so we can use the 20/40Mhz coexistence feature. I'll re-check after the next firmware release.
- I still see tons of other bugs: satellites disconnecting, inconsistent UI in the app vs. admin panel, etc... but I'll open new threads of discussion for them
- Despite the forum having plenty of "works for me" responses to complaints, I'd say that overall for me the Orbi has not been worth the trouble it has caused. A 5% problem rate would be really bad and still would mean that 95% of people are happy so every thread would be full of happy stories. Instead we see many issues and almost no means for users to fix, debug or help themselves other than stab randomly at the settings. You can't have Apple-level simplicity in the interface without a corresponding dedication to constraining the things that can go wrong, testing, and bug fixing. Netgear really needs to invest in and focus on reliability. Adding half-baked features makes the problem worse.