NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
Orbi 970 Constants Reboots - Solved!!! (Router overheating is the cause)
I bought a Orbi 970 system with two satellites in mid-February. Had it hooked up to a 5-Gig symmetric internet service. Didn't have any issues for weeks as I only put a few devices on it while ot...
Netgear opened a support case on their own seeing this thread and reached out to me.
Gave them all the details they asked for to help them investigate.
Hopefully this leads to a solution that helps future adopters of this hardware have a seamless experience because the Orbi 970 is spectacularly good outside of this.
I purchased the 970 bundle with 2 sats as soon as it was available (I think back in November of 23) and have had this same issue every since. I've gone round and round and round with support trying to solve the reboot issues. Finally noticed the unit seemed extremely hot. Put a fan on it, not a single issue for a month.
Recently I moved the entire network setup to an area with far more open space and thought it would be fine so didn't plug in the fan.... Nope, reboots and crashes 2 days in. Plugged the fan back in and all is working again. I feel this is a horrible design flaw. I live in Alaska and it's not a hot climate. đ
I don't have any update from engineering, except support reaching out asking if this is still a problem, and/or if anything has changed. For how much they charge for these devices, it's very unfortunate that this wasn't discovered prior to starting large-scale manufacturing - adding fans could have been so relatively easy at design time and wouldn't have cost much in the bill of materials.
This is the only known thread I have seen on this issue, and I also opened a case with Netgear on Tuesday over this issue. After an hour of analysis, they asked me to swap power supplies with one of the satellites and monitor uptime. So far after 2 days, no reboots, but mine have been pretty random over the last 2 months. I also measured thermal output of the RBE971, mine also shows about 90F under a relatively low network load. Have the RBE971 more out in the open now vice in an enclosure with a fan running over it, and it seems more stable right now. I also have applied engineering thinking, even asked support if I could try an engineering-level firmware with better logging to monitor the crashes (existing logging is just crap, only monitors minor events, which are lost when the router reboots), and they didn't sign up for that. I tend to agree there is an engineering flaw in the cooling system of the RBE971, and overheating seems to be causing the random reboots. But Netgear will not admit that at this point.
Just curious, in your configuration, do you have the fan blowing in from the top to cool, or blowing to pull hot air out from the RBE971?
My fan sits on top and pulls from the RBR below upwards.
While I started this thread about reboots, and I'd almost completely solved that with the fan sucking air up above the router, I had another issue with WiFi-6E where my 6E devices would lose connectivity with the devices losing even static IPs and get assigned 169.254.xxx.yyy IP addresses for the duration of internet loss. It would be completely random and only hit one device at a time usually.
A custom firmware did nothing to help with that (my newest iPad Pro M4 was replaced by Apple to rule out a Apple-facing hardware issue). Netgear decided that the logs from the router and satellites when this was happening was 'unusual' and initiated an RMA for the router.
I've filled in whatever was needed and I'm waiting for that process to go through.
For the rebooting issue, I don't think I have "reboots" but with the latest 'private' firmware, I do get random once-a-week internet drops even with the fan on top of the router. Affects everything including devices wired to the satellites. And the 3 satellites themselves are all wired to the router. The saving grace is that the recovery is very fast (relative to the original problem without fans) - 30 seconds or so. Measured temps when this happens are in the 74-degree range right above the router.
Because an RMA is happening anyway, I'll report if that does anything at all for reboots.
