Your experience with Firmware 2.2.1.210 released as of 10/3/18

TLDR: Updated without issue. Devices showing slightly decreased signal strengh but the wireless network has been up/down so it'll probably sort itself out after roaming a bit.

I manually updated tonight to work out any issues before next week and risk any unplanned outage from Orbi updating itself. I've had that happen in the past and I'm still mad about it. I wasn't looking for any specific features or fixes from this firmware. It's hard to get excited about release notes that say esentially "fixed some stuff" without going into detail about what was fixed. I'm used to release notes being dozens of pages long that details specifics... Netgear has major updates with 4 line release notes. haha!

Disclaimer: I have a nonstandard deployment in AP mode doing all the things that gives FURRYe38 nightmares...

Setup: I have the RBK53 in AP mode connected through a managed switch (yes... with IGMP snooping enabled!). My gateway is a pfsense sg3100 with the RBR50 as the Orbi "router" and two sats RBS50. L3 services such as gateway/routing, DHCP, DNS, mDNS/IGMP, etc. are all handled by my sg3100 firewall. Orbi has BEAMFORMING, MU-MIMO, and Fast Roaming enabled. 2.4GHz and 5GHz SSIDs split with different names. Daisy Chain is disabled. I'm wireless backhaul with pretty close proximity (4000 sq ft 3 floor home) with maybe 40 feet betwen the sats and the router. I have the router and one sat on either end of the middle floor. I have another sat in the middle of the top floor.

Update Experience: I've read to update sats before the router so I started to do that. I updated one RBS50 and it rebooted twice. No issue. Uploaded firmware to the other RBS50 but it timed out before I could complete the firmware upload (so I thought). Turns out the RBR50 (which I didn't upload firmware to) had decided to update itself. When the 3 devices came back up, they all reported updated firmware. 5G backhaul to the BRK50 like before. I did NOT perform a factory reset and have not for the past several firmware updates.

Before/After Testing: I have a Verizon FIOS 150/150Mbps connection. Download speeds before and after remained mostly the same 151/149 has been the average from my Samsung S9 over the last hour and a "quiet network" (everyone else is in bed) and I'm just listening to music. I ran some tests on DSL Reports before and I was getting A+ or A ratings for Overall, Bufferbloat and Quality. (I'm using pfsense + CoDel to manage my up/down bandwidth.) Bufferbloat rating went down a bit but tweaking the queue has helped a little bit. mDNS browser shows all my Google Home/minis, chromecasts, echos, wemo plugs, etc. are all back up. At first glance the majority of our devices are online... I normally see 40+ active devices during the day and tonight I only see 30 which is about normal for night.

Conclusion: If this stays the same... that will be 2 firmware updates without issue. Time will tell as to the stablilty but initial impressions are looking good. Family will put stability/streaming to the test with their devices over the weekend.