Orbi 960 Wired Backhaul driving me nuts

Great diagram, thanks.

When Netgear software engineers designed Orbi routers, the assumption was that satellites appear only on the "LAN side" of the router.  connected either:

• over a 5G WiFi connection, or
• through one of the LAN ports of the router

Satellites are not found on the WAN side of the router, so the firmware does not look for satellites on that port.

Could they have designed the product differently?  Maybe.  But they designed it this way.

As an intellectual question:  Why does the network "seem to work", but the Orbi router has no idea what's going on with the satellites and their attached devices?

Answer: because the wiring and switches create an Ethernet LAN subnet, every device is able to find every other device by issuing an Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) broadcast which returns the hardware MAC address of the sought device.  The Ethernet adapters/swith ports use their ARP records to say, "Oh, to reach 192.168.1.45, I send a packet out port 4 to MAC address 00:00:00:00:00:00 and it will get there."

As plemans mentioned, this has become a frequent topic on the forum.

As to whether this disqualifies the Orbi from being a "true WiFi access point", the situation may be a bit ambiguous.  I have some generic WiFi access points in my "Box of Stuff".  They are not "mesh" WiFi, so in addition to having no "router functions", they have no knowledge of other network devices at all.  I would have to see what happens when one of those non-mesh WiFi APs is connected to the network using a LAN port rather than the WAN port their installation procedure calls for.  Hmmmmm.  A project!