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Forum Discussion
Orbi RBK852 Experience
Just wanted to share my experience so far with the new RBK852. I have two devices that have WiFi-6, so thought I'd take the plunge and see how things went. I went through the app installation pr...
Well not sure why your seeing experiences that you are. When I use it, it helps me determine if the device is connecting near the connection rate of the device or the wifi AP signal source. Which ever the base rate is and what is lower or higher. Just checking my iphone 6sP, it seems to max out at around 500Mbps. Which maybe the norm for my older iphone.
Yes even on my old mac book pro 2008 which supported 300Mbps on 5Ghz N mode. The rate seen in the wifi drop down was always 270Mbps. I never saw actual 300Mbps listed here.
The app is a useful tool, at leat for me. Just someting I include in my tool box.
Bandito wrote:Just wanted to share my experience so far with the new RBK852. I have two devices that have WiFi-6, so thought I'd take the plunge and see how things went.
I went through the app installation process and had a couple of hiccups, but the software recovered and allowed me to continue the setup process until after the router updated its firmware. Once it rebooted, DHCP wasn't working and it wasn't assigning addresses to any devices. I restarted the router again and this time all was working correctly.
I had to manually update the firmware on the satellite, but that went smoothly. After this, I made all my settings changes and I was off and running. I then started running my speed tests and that's where things kinda fell apart. Under the RBK852 system, I was only getting 150-175 Mbps speeds where the previous RBK53 was giving me 250-300 Mbps. Next, I tried my iPhone 11 Pro Max, thinking that it would do better, but it got the same 150-175 Mbps speeds. Following that, I tried my new laptop and it got the same slower speeds as well.
I think the main reason for this is that there is only 1 satellite. It has a good connection to the router, but with only two devices, the system just doesn't have enough power for higher throughputs. With my Orbi RBK53 system, I added 1 satellite for a total of four devices at various points throughout the house to provide a strong signal everywhere and thus I get pretty much the full speed of my Internet connection which is 300 Mbps AT&T fiber.
I was actually going to upgrade my connection to 1000 Mbps to take full advantage of the WiFi-6's improved throughput, but after testing everything with the RBK852, I clearly won't be getting enough throughput generally to make the upgrade worthwhile. Color me disappointed. đ
So, I'll play around a bit more, but am not expecting any significant speed improvements now with the RBK852. Likely it will be going back to Bestbuy in a couple of weeks. Makes me wonder if and when Netgear will sell standalone satellites for the system, but I don't know if I really want to invest another $700 for two more satellites. That would mean the total system cost would be $1,400, which is pretty steep for home WiFi in my opinion. Oh well.
Well, WiFi Sweet Spot issues aside, the new Orbi RBK852 system is performing well for me so far. By saying that, hopefully I haven't jinxed anything.
My old Orbi RBK53 system had an issue where after 2-3 days throughput on WiFi would drop to one-tenth of normal, requiring a reboot to restore full speed. After many months, a firmware update finally fixed the issue, but a with the just-released firmware update it seems to have gone back to its old slow ways again.
The new system has been stable for me since Saturday, so I'll start checking for slowdowns now, but hopefully won't experience this same problem again.
Good to hear. Ya I think the 852 system is pretty solid in wifi operation and coverage.
Was curious, what FW fixed your RBK53 slow down and did you do a factory reset and setup from scratch after you applied that lastest FW update on the RBK53?
Seems odd that for you, a 50 series seems problematic. Seems like a enviroment issue as well.
Bandito wrote:Well, WiFi Sweet Spot issues aside, the new Orbi RBK852 system is performing well for me so far. By saying that, hopefully I haven't jinxed anything.
My old Orbi RBK53 system had an issue where after 2-3 days throughput on WiFi would drop to one-tenth of normal, requiring a reboot to restore full speed. After many months, a firmware update finally fixed the issue, but a with the just-released firmware update it seems to have gone back to its old slow ways again.
The new system has been stable for me since Saturday, so I'll start checking for slowdowns now, but hopefully won't experience this same problem again.
FURRYe38 ,
The current firmware available on the support site for the RBK53, 2.5.0.38, is the one that fixed the problem, but if you check on the Orbi itself there is a newer version and the newer one seems to have reverted back to the slowdown problem
I do not perform a factory reset after any upgrade anymore. I went through months of troubleshooting with Netgear support and would perform factory resets that would do nothing to change the system's behavior, so I don't bother anymore. It's a waste of time and effort.
The settings that are recorded from you user configuration are simply written to a secure non-volatile memory location on the system and then these locations are read back into the system at boot time to set the configuration. If Netgear is doing a halfway decent job of writing their firmware, doing a factory reset and overwriting these values with default values does nothing but erase your configuration work. There should never be a need to erase these values unless they completely change the configuration memory storage schema. Needing to change the schema is extremely rare as if they have new configuration data that they want to store they can simply tack it on to the end of the existing data using new memory locations.
We, Netgear support and I, checked all kinds of different scenarios and they even replaced the router as part of the troubleshooting process, but nothing pointed us to an environmental problem. I gathered several debug logs for them from when the system was working normally and when it was running slowly and about two or three months later a firmware update was released and the problem went away. I was never notified that a fix was available, so it just be coincidence that the problem went away, but I believe that they were able to identify what was going on and fixed it, but I don't really know for sure.