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Forum Discussion

PlanePoke's avatar
Oct 17, 2020
Solved

Orbi RBK853 Satellites limited to 90Mbps

I just installed a new orbi RBK853 system: an RBR850 router, and 2 RBS 850 satellites.  Both satellites are hard-wired for the backhaul directly to the router.  When I do a network speed test from a ...
  • PlanePoke's avatar
    PlanePoke
    Oct 19, 2020

    I fixed it!  Here was the problem:

    When my house was wired with Cat5e, they split each cable: 4 wires for ethernet, and 4 for telephone.  That will allow 100Mbps at most with 100BASE-Tx.   But to get faster speeds, ALL 8 wires on the Cat5e must be used in the connectors.

     

    Solution:

    I cut the wires for the phone lines on each of the Cat5e cables I was using for the satelite backhaul (since I am not using the phone connection in the rooms where I have the satellites) and wired them on to a single connector.  Then I wired them to the router in the configuration recommended by Netgear when using a switch: Wired Backhaul Now the speed I get when connected wirelessly to either of the satellites, is the same as when I am wirelessly connected to the router:  The full 400Mbps download I pay for from the cable company. 

     

    I hope that this experience will be helpful to anyone else with this problem.  I learned alot about the differences between Fast, and Gigabit Ethernet in this process!