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Forum Discussion
Uprgrade from RBR50 to RBK852 and now getting slower Wifi - any suggestions?
After upgrading to 1Gb Fibre at my home I was happy to get speeds over wifi of about 200Mbs on my old Orbi system but when more than a couple devices were being used I would see that drop to levels that I'll admit a more than acceptable but still far lower than I hoped and with more and more 4K video streaming and gaming between 5 people at the same time I didn't want to ever see lag again now that I have 1Gb Firbre. At great expense I upgraded to the new WIFI 6 Orbi model hoping that it would at the very least be able to handle more 200Mbs connections before slowing down but I've actually com to see my speed drop to around 175Mbs instead. Not worth my $1000 Cdn to get worse speeds. I have an AORUS X570 wifi pro which claims wifi 6 and so I was actually expecting to jump up to at least 400Mbs over wifi on this machine if not even closer to the 800 that would be the upper limit.
Now the speed test in the Orbi app is showing over 800Mbs but everything on wifi is down below 200 now. I need help trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong either in my computers wifi settings or the Orbi settings OR to figure out why I spent $1k?
So far I've:
updated the orbi drivers - no change
all drivers on the computer are updated - no change because they are always kept up to date. (unless it's an optional update I'd have to go looking for)
looked into X570 bios updates - nothing lists WIFI 6 changes in newer bios but if I have to I'll update it.
tested speeds on my phone - Slower now than they were on my previous orbi.
Any help would be appreciated.
12 Replies
Your home devices are also a factor. What wifi do they support? Single stream, multi stream, etc, etc. For example, if all your devices are on the 2G band, they you are going to be lower than 5G.
Have you tried different locations for your Satellites? Just because with the Orbi WiFi 5 the router and satellite location(s) worked, it still may mean that you have to adjust the satellite location for your Orbi WiFi 6 setup.
Thanks for the reply, I am looking for any help to see if this is worth a $1k investment before I return it.
I have an AORUS X570 wifi pro (Motherboard on my new PC) which claims wifi 6 (I've also reached out to their forums about this looking for any suggestions as well) that has 15' straight LOS with the satelite and 1 wall and 25' from the main unit. Both Orbi's are exactly where the previous units were when I was gettting consistant wifi speeds over 200Mb/s.
Other devices are not expected to perform over this rate BUT the whole point was that with 4 devices using 200Mb/s at the same time the WIFI 6 should keep them all at that speed rather than slowing down because of total load. That has shown not to be the case so far AND I'm seeing a drop in speed on my wifi 6 PC with nothing else having changed except the new ORBI system. Every device in the device manager is on the 5Ghz channel or plugged directly into the unit but I'm looking specifically at wifi only. Multiple tests over several hours are all showing slower speed (Just now 165 which is way below the consistent 200+ I was getting) so it's HIGHLY unlikeley that some background dowloading or updating of devices is causing a slowdown.
Looking at this from the perspective of a non technical user, 0 benefits and 1 drawback so far. And if as you suggest this new device may not perform the same as its predecessor in the same locations, most users would benefit from knowing their old Orbi works better than the newest one priced 3 times higher.
Again, thank you for your response, I'll take anything that might be helpful.
theoak wrote:Your home devices are also a factor. What wifi do they support? Single stream, multi stream, etc, etc. For example, if all your devices are on the 2G band, they you are going to be lower than 5G.
Have you tried different locations for your Satellites? Just because with the Orbi WiFi 5 the router and satellite location(s) worked, it still may mean that you have to adjust the satellite location for your Orbi WiFi 6 setup.
25 feet between the router and the satellite may be a little close; especially, now that you have wifi 6 in the mix with newer/better hardware and capabilities.
Can you take the satellite out of the mix for a test and just use the router? What do you get with just the router?
