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Forum Discussion
FolioGraphic
Mar 18, 2020Aspirant
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 t...
theoak
Mar 18, 2020Luminary
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.
FolioGraphic
Mar 18, 2020Aspirant
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.
- theoakMar 18, 2020Luminary
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?
- FolioGraphicMar 18, 2020Aspirant
That was a good suggestion. Ensuring that the wifi 6 PC was connected to the main unit rather than the satelite brought the speed back up to 250. That's back to and better than the 200 of the older unit.
I'll have to look into how to force my PC to connect only to the main unit now. And here are my "but"s
BUT, isn't wifi 6 supposed to be better than 250 in this situation? Again, I was expecting to get up to at least 400 and if I disconnect everything else I would expect it to approach it's 800 top end.
another BUT, that doesn't say much for the usefulness of the satelite and it's exclusive backhaul channel.
I'd still have to say that I'm not impressed at all with this, especially given the promises and price difference. 50mb/s faster (25% up rather than 100-200% I was expecting) but ONLY if the device is connected directly to the main unit?
all my "but"s aside, how do I enforce a connection only through the main unit and keep the outdoor range boosting of the satelite?
- theoakMar 18, 2020Luminary
Can you find a farther position for the satellite?
Also, is your Orbi in Access Point mode? Do you have another router in the mix? Does that router have any sort of QoS bandwidth capping in the mix? Maybe that needs to be set to 1 gig to match your ISP?
Edit:
If your older unit was giving you 200 ... and you are now at 250 ... that is a 25% improvement, which is not bad if you look at from that perspective. Now ... if that 25% is worth $1k ... only you can decide that.