What you can expect with your Orbi system

I'm writing this mainly because a post like this would have saved me a lot of time and effort. If you're thinking about buying an Orbi system, or recently purchased one, here's a few things you can expect:

1. The devices look great so you can set them up anywhere.
2. The wifi speed is impressive - 200-300Mbs actual throughout most of the coverage area.
3. The band steering (the feature that tries to keep 5Ghz capable clients on the 5Ghz network), doesn't really work. 5Ghz capable devices keep ending up on the 2.4Ghz radio even though a useable 5Ghz signal is available.
4. You'll keep lossing connectivity, partial or complete, for a few seconds or a few minutes. This will happen a few times a day if you use it all day.

After working for over a year trying to chase down and fix problems, here's the situaton with those last two problems. 

First, the band steering implemented by netgear just doesn't work very well. There are no magic switches or settings to change, it's just not reliable. There isn't way to make it reliable, but you can work around the issue. There is an undocumented way to separate out the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz SSIDs that a helpful user detailed. If you use this, you just avoid the bandsteering problems.

Second are the disconnects. They will seem random, they are hard to reproduce, and restarting any satellite or the router will resolve them when they show up.  I spent months trying to track this one down specificially and never got farther than confirming it's a layer 2 issue with the Orbi backhaul. The fact that it's a layer 2 backhaul issue is easy to confirm. When you're having any connectivity problems with a device, just change the device radio's MAC address, wait a few seconds for a new DHCP address and "viola", the connectivity problems will be fixed.

If you dive deeper into the sauce, poking around the Orbi's customized OpenWRT system using their telnet access, you'll find that the WDS system is incredibly unreliable. All it takes is a few laps around your house switching APs to cause a MAC address to get "stuck". Roaming isn't a requirement for the backhaul to start messing up, but it's easier to cause it to happen that way.

There is no fix for this second issue. It's something you have to just live with. If you don't use your system for work, and rarely roam between APs with your devices, you probably won't notice it too much. If you do - sorry, this is going to drive you crazy.

If you call netgear, you'll be told to restart the system, reload the firmware, play with channels, and a host of other things. None of them will help. You're just wasting time.

Note, these problems have existed for at least the past 8 revisions of their firmware and have shown no improvement. There is no reason to think that netgear will fix this, ever. They have the easy "reboot and it works again" fix available. So, this is one of those things you'll have to live with.