Wow - Orbi is unbelievable! with some tweaks

I wanted to give a bit of insight into my WiFi Upgrade over the past couple of weeks. I moved to a new house (live in Melbourne Australia) a few months back. It is a double fronted older victorian with a large extension off the back.  The house is quite long 200+ feet front to back. My cable modem comes into the back of the house where there is built in ethernet (this does not go the the older front of the house). Connection is 125 Mb Down / 2.5Mb up. I want to get full ehternet like speed in the front of the house where my iMac workstation will be. 

When I moved in, I setup my old system which has been rock solid and worked ok in the new house as well.  I have an AirPort Extreme and use powerline networking to link to two Airport Express in the middle and front of the house.  Powerline can only get about 35Mb, so the front 2/3s of the house had stable but middling performance.  The issue is I want my new iMac in the front of the house which is my workstation, connected not only to the Internet but my Drobo and other stuff in the back of the house. BTW, the Apple networking gear is rock solid - a shame they appear to have gotton out of the business.

So after much research, it came done to a Velop 3 node or an Orbi 5bk50 (2 node - Australia does not sell any three node). The deciding factor was that the Orbi could only do star (Or so I thought) and no ehternet backhaul. Went with the Velop. Setup the Velop and performance at first seemed ok, nearly double the Apple \ powerline setup so around 70Mb in the middle of the house. Ah, then the frustration set in. Sometimes 20Mb, sometimes 70Mb, sometimes nothing. Started to move the nodes around, but you are flying beyond completely blind. The darn thing tells you absolutely nothing. You can't see what nodes clients are connecting to, can't see what nodes are connecting to each other. You can't control or see ANYTHING! I simply could not troubleshoot or optimize in any way.  Just blind luck - was the mesh network not getting a solid link, were the clients connecting to 2.4Ghz? 5Ghz? Even if I could figure out what was going on, no way to fix it. Sure, if I were just surfing the web, there was no dead zones and decent coverage, but this was certainly worse than my Apple setup and did not come close to my ultimate goal of giving me Ethernet like speeds in the front of the house. 

Frustrated, I started looking at Orbi again (and Ubiquity). Two big hurdles, star topology, no ethernet backhaul.  No matter how good it might be, I was pretty confident it was not going to get rock solid ethernet like speeds in the front of the house with two nodes. Then I say the 2.0.0.74 firmware update had brought DaisyChain! This might possibly work. I bought two RBK50s (unfortunately, AU does not sell an independent RBS50 or a three node kit :( Hooked it all up, simple. Went to the front of the house and - 35Mb - darn. But wait, the Orbi actually lets you see what the heck is going on. Sure enough, I was connecting to the 2.4ghz band. Played around for a while and realized the issue was the 2.4Ghz stickiness.

That is good info which now I can try to address. I assumed the Orbi backhaul 5Ghz connection could not make the jump from the middle of my house SBS50 (which is actually closer to the back) to the front another daisychained SBS50. This meant my two SBS50s were fairly close, about 30 feet and two walls. I moved it all the way to the front of the house (100 feet and 4 walls). OMG, when I stood in the room with the daisychained SBS50 nearly 200+ feet and 6 walls from the RBR50, I was getting my full 125Mb - zero degredation.  Woohoo. The sepration of the SBS units by min 50 feet also helped with switching between nodes.

But in the next few hours, I realized the darn 2.4Ghz connection would pick up too often given how far apart the SBS units were and the iPhone would try to hold the connection. Hmm - Lower the 2.4Ghz power. I set the 2.4Ghz power down to 25%. Now, the iPhone will switch within 30seconds of getting near another node to 5Ghz. It is lioke magic. I am getting 125Mb in the whole house rock solid, all the time.  One room in the middle of the two SBS50s sometimes will use 2.4Ghz and get about 45Mb on my iPhone, but all the Mac and windows laptops pull in the 5Ghz and get 125Mb. Best of all, I am getting nearly 350Mb in the front room on the LAN. Latency is 8ms in the front room over the daisychain.  I literally don't think I now need any ethernet backhaul.  

My point is the Orbi is incredibly powerful, and gave me the information to get the best setup for my house.  The Velop might have been able to do this (I doubt it now because I don't think the backhaul on the mesh is nearly as capable and is not dedicated, but even if it could I would have never been able to have the information to get it done). You do need to think about and tweak for your phsical layout - but this is a massive benefit if you are trying to extract near ethernet speeds overa big distance.  If I just brought home the Orbi, plugged it in and tested, It would have been ok, but not near the full crazy potential this thing has.  

One comment for NetGear - Please make the RBS50 available standalone in AU! I see in the next few weeks the RBS40 will be made avaiable, why not the RBS50? I had to in the end buy two RBK50s and will now try to sell the RBR50 on ebay.