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Forum Discussion
Orbi 850 extension/satelite
Hi all
I have an 850 with one satelite.
Has anyone had expereince adding an R6400V2 router to the mesh as a satelite/range extender?
I have a unused R6400 and want to extend our home net to a barn about 60 ft from the nearest ORBI satelite with it if at all possible. If needed I could go hardwired but would rather go over wifi. (Note: I used a linksys wifi hub in the barn with the mesh before and have connected to the mesh directly from a laptop from the barn. Both worked ok so the signal is good enough)
Any help/suggestions appreciated.
Andy
1 Reply
The R6400 can be connected only with an Ethernet cable (i.e. 'wired') See page 13 of the User Manual:
https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/R6400v2/R6400v2_UM_EN.pdf
(the yellow cable).
If the R6400 is put into Access Point (AP) mode (page 76 in the User Manual), then devices connected to the R6400 will be in the same IP subnet as the main Orbi system and communication between devices will be seamless. However, WiFi devices will not roam seamlessly between the R6400 WiFi and the Orbi WiFi. The IEEE standards that control how user devices migrate from one access point to another apply to a single network (802.11k, r, v) Even if the R6400 WiFi is set to be identical to the Orbi (SSID/password), when a device migrates from one area to the other, it will behave as if it was migrating from one part of town to another. It will "hang onto" the existing WiFi connection until the connection is too poor to be usable, and only then begin looking for a new connection. "Aha! Here's another WiFi signal that I recognize. Gosh, it's got credentials identical to the one I just gave up on."
