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Forum Discussion
Is my satellite dead?
I have an Orbi 970 set - router + 4 satellites (5 devices). I’ve extended warranty and all that. Mine was one of those sets where the router was “overheating” and dropping. And putting a fan on t...
You'd helped me before in this thread --
"Orbi 970 Constants Reboots - Solved!!! (Router overheating is the cause)"
- TL;DR of that -- fans over the RBR prevented random reboots.
- Netgear replaced the whole set of RBR + satellites - no issue after that even without fans. I keep running fans anyway over the RBR for good luck and longevity, I guess.
I got a fourth satellite for a Wifi 6Ghz deadspot on my third floor after everything was stable. And even that has been stable for many months. The issue is currently with one of the satellites in the original 'factory-new' replacement set.
All units connect over ethernet to the RBR. It's not the wiring to each location (or the power adapters) because the problem follows the satellite, and none of the other satellites have a problem in this satellites original location (or any other location) or the power adapters.
To the layout, RBR on first floor at the center of the house. 3 satellites on 3 extremities of the second floor - one on the north-east corner, one on the south-east corner, and one far west (equidistant north to south - this is the one that has the problem). The fourth satellite is on the third floor far south - equidistant east to west. All units are separated by several walls and at least 50 feet in direct line of sight from any other unit if all walls were transparent.
What I've done now to reduce the impact to my day to day - I've swapped the third-floor unit with the 'broken' unit.
On the Orbi browser page, the satellite is showing (for the past day until now) as alternating between having an IP and not having an IP (page self-refresh) and the connection type as 5 GHz (even though it's wired) and persistently stuck in Config Sync. As I'm writing this out and staring at that page, it went from Config Sync to Disconnected (with a button to 'Remove' showing up). I've been doing literally nothing with any unit as the browser page ('Attached Devices') kept changing.
This is crazy - as I'm writing this - it's showing up again with an IP with connection type 'Wired' and with Config Sync. And a couple of seconds later, it goes to Disconnected.
It looks like it just keeps looping through these states over and over (now again on '5 Ghz Wifi'). I'm convinced there's some hardware fault with this now.
Will try the 30-30-30 reset and seeing what happens with only that satellite turned on.
Netgear's already opened a support case based on this thread. Thanks!
What is the size of the home in sq ft?
~3300 sq ft spread over 3 floors with the 3 floor just being a bonus room of about 600 sq ft. ~40 ft wide, ~55 ft deep and maybe 35 ft high.
One portion of that 3rd floor open-floor room is a complete Wi-Fi deadspot for my iPad and iPhone [Wi-Fi disappears completely], so that's where the final satellite (wired) I reluctantly purchased went, and now it's the resting place for this broken satellite.
Two satellites are in the far front of the house on the second floor in the furthest 90degree corners of the house structure. They are about 40 feet apart separated by 2-3 walls in 'line of sight'.
The location of the broken satellite (and now hosts what-used-to-be the bonus room satellite) is 50 feet from the front of the house on the second floor. The broken satellite used to notably host a wired pi-hole resolving DNS queries for a ton of devices (IoT & otherwise) across the network.
The RBR sits in a walk-in clothes closet on the first-floor smack in the middle of the house - where all my networking, cable and fiber wiring terminates. It has a large steel panel refrigerator behind a wall on one side limiting range backwards. The broken satellite compensates for some of this - it used to sit wired in a master closet initially but I was hitting frequent network drops in the bedroom and first floor living areas for Wi-Fi 6 devices so it made its way there.
The house structure extremity placement for satellites is also for optimal WiFi camera performance and personal device performance in the yards too. If one satellite goes down, network perf goes down from 1.5-1.6 Gbps on my phone down to 200 Megs. It's abysmally low for things like my desktop that go down to 10 - 30 Megs over "remote-satellite" or RBR wifi connections.
I run spectrum analyzer regularly and generally have each network band assigned to interference free channels (w.r.t neighbors). That was the first thing I rechecked when the first intermittent drops started happening on this satellite.
