NETGEAR MR80/MS80 (MK83) EasyMesh with VLANs

Hello,

I have been using a NETGEAR MR80 Router (the Router of the MK83), firstly as my main router (Modem into the WAN port) along with two extenders NETGEAR MS80 Satellites both via a wired backhaul and had no issues.

I then upgraded to an appliance router so I put the MR80 into access point mode, and again, no issues - the MR80 is connected to the NEGEAR smart switch on the WAN port and the other MS80s coming off the switch on their LAN ports and everything works as expected.

I was using my switch without VLANs setup at this point and I setup VLANs so the default being 1 and basically I wanted the MR80 and MS80 all to be on VLAN 105.

I setup the switches manually as although the switches do support NETGEAR Insight, I've found issues whereby Insight says one thing but the switch is doing something else so I removed them from Insight and set them up manually using their web based GUIs. Each switch basically has an uplink (trunk) port so the VLANs are members and tagged on that port going either to the router or to another switch.

Devices are then simply untagged members of a given VLAN coming off a port with a PVID to match that VLAN membership and everything works fine.

I can even plug in the MR80, make it an untagged member of VLAN 105 and set a PVID of 105 and the MR80 works absolutely fine on VLAN 105.

The issue arises though when I plug in one or more MS80 Satellites. I again setup the port on the switch for the Satellite to VLAN 105 so they are on the same VLAN as the MR80 and they talk to eachother and both turn blue but when you Ping the IP of either the MR80 or any of the MS80s, there's ping times allover the place, some miss, packet loss etc to both and the signal off them drops straight away to connected devices despite both showing blue lights.

As soon as I unplug the LAN cable to the MS80 the MR80 works flawlessly again so I am minded to think this is a problem with how the Ethernet Backhaul works between the MR80 and MS80(s) when VLANs are enabled. I don't understand why this is an issue though because the tags are removed before they enter the MR80 or MS80 so as far as their concerned they are just on the same network.

I know these devices are EasyMesh compatible means they can also talk to other EasyMesh devices even from different manufacturers.

Does anyone have any experience regarding this or any ideas what is going wrong?

Thanks in advance! 🙂