Wifi Signal Lost from Orbi Daily - About to Return to Costco

I just picked a one set from Costco yesterday because they were on sale for $70 less ($399). The Orbi system is meant to replace my very old Airport Extreme router, which has been working quite well over the years. Because of the way the cables are routed in my 3-storey house, the Orbi router has to be located on the top floor, instead of the recommended 2nd floor. I have been in the IT industry for all my career and i had never had any issue setting up any network (WiFi or Ethernet) until last night. Configuring the Orbi system was tediously painful.

I first replaced the Airport Extreme router with the Orbi router. I then connected the Orbi satellites (one on the 1st floor and one on the second floor) in hope of using wired Ethernet backhaul. Next i launched the Orbi app in iOS to start the intiial configuration. It took multiple attempts and multi resets of the Orbi router because the initial configuration finally went through. But immediately after, i would not be able to connect to the router. Even though i could still see the WiFi network, i just could not connect to it. Eventually, i got in touch with Netgear support who suggested configuring the router with the satellites less than 10 feet from the router. That did the trick. 

I then move the satellites back to where i wanted them and reconnected them for a wired backhaul configuration. Initial Speedtest seemed to indicate a much better performance than my old Airport Extreme router - one would expect so since that Airport Extreme router was probably 10 years old. I did a few more Speedtest while moving from floor to floor. I wanted to see if the switch from one satellite to another, or from the router to the satellite, would be seamless. Here's when i encountered this issue. During the Speedtest run, if i move from one floor to the other, the test would fail almost 2 out of 3 times. When that happened, even though my iPhone was still connected to the WiFi network, it would not be able to get out to the internet for a few minutes. 

Another oddity i noted last night was - while my iPhone was still connecting to the WiFi network, my MacBook lost the connection after i made some changes to the Orbi configuration and it took a really really long time before it could re-establish a connection. Disableing and re-enabling WiFi on the MacBook did not resolve the issue.

I am going to thoroughly test this Orbi system for another week. If the instability i am seeing persists, this is going back to Costco.