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I've been searching the forums and the Internet in general, today, as I have gotten my first notice from Comcast that, lo, I am over my 1 Terabyte limit, this month. It has been inching toward that mark for a bit, and last month was around 944 Gig. What can I say: We are a connected, gaming, streaming family and our Comcast link is a vital utility. I have seen suggestions on this forum to "just disconnect everything and reconnect until you find the hog." With 30ish devices on the network, 4 kids, 2 renters, and countless visitors, this is simply not a possibility. What I could do is set up a different router (preferably one with this feature) and move the connections over to it one-by-one until I find the offender. If I have to go that route, I highly doubt the Orbi would get reconnected. Which is a shame because it is a pretty decent solution for everything else.
I would like for Netgear to seriously consider giving customers an option for this data. There are many ways to do it, but ANY of them would be acceptable to me. I'm a long-time networking pro, so even if these are scary for some people, at least it would be an option.
- Do the metering in the device with display of the statistics in the interface and in the app. This is obviously going to make the most customers happy because it would give us a report per-device of the usage. This isn't rocket science: Even if the device has a database limitation of 100 devices to monitor, or even 50, it would be useful. COMCAST does it on their modem devices for xFi. It can't be that hard.
- Do the metering externally by providing SNMP statistics on a per-device basis for smaller timeframes. This would mean that the Orbi doesn't have to store "dead" devices forever and would be up to whatever stat-gathering tool was used.
- Do the metering externally by providing some app that collects the data to a desktop. Maybe Java so you can hit Windows, Linux, and Mac all at once with it.
- Provide traffic mirroring to a selected wired port. This would at least give me the ability to plug in Wireshark or other tools to see what is going on. It would be super useful for troubleshooting intermittent issues and not just bandwidth monitoring.
- Provide netflow/sflow output to a collector on the home network. This would also have broader uses than just bandwidth monitoring, but it is potentially the hardest to use solution in this list. If it is easy to implement in the Orbi (i.e., the chips already support it), then I'll take it happily.
- Other things I haven't mentioned. Look, I'm desperate, here. I will find a way to use anything that helps.
I get 2 months free "warnings" from Comcast, but the cost of not knowing this outweighs replacing the Orbi. Once I start getting charged $10/50 Gig, I'm going to need to know right then and there. And if I don't have a reasonable answer by that time, another Orbi will be going out to eBay.
195 Comments
So in checking back up on this thread I did some more research on what to do. Come to find out Eero mesh wifi has the same issue! I'll link below but they're had a feature request thread just like this one with no response. Apparently you could view all the usage and then an update happened and now you have to click each device which is rough but worlds better than us Orbi owners.
I'll be buying a Google Nest wifi system as Orbi isn't repsonding and never implementing this feature. It's a MUST HAVE during these times even if you ISP is waiving data cap overages (Cox is through 30 June but I'm sure they'll bring them back).
https://community.eero.com/t/q5mhlh/feature-request-bandwidth-monitor?pg=3
Not trying to dispearage any company, but I wanted to share were I ended up on my journey. I litterally bought and returned almost every router on the market over the past month. I ended up with one that I really am thrilled with.
Here is what I tried and the quick response.
Asus - AX Mesh, AX88U - Has all the features I wanted. Firmware was buggy and unstable.
Netgear Orbi AX6000 - Best performance, great setup. No family mode (which was important for me), no bandwidth control.
Netgear XR700 - Dumaos is awesome, no mesh solution. 3.0 Dumaos looks great, but never came to market. This was my second choice.
Netgear Nighthawk AX12 - Great wifi, no bandwidth control, or parental control (none of the new wifi 6 units have it).
TP-Link AX6000 - Great features, slow ethernet for some reason. No Mesh.
And the winner is...
Synology RC2600ac
RSM is amazing router OS. Gives you all the control you could want.The QoS is outstanding. Since I've been using this, not issues on my uploads maxing out, inspite of fully saturating the line. Excellent parental controls (simiarl to circle), excellent bandwith monitoring and limiting. Excellent Mesh support. Dual WAN, VPN support, NAS support, Package Center (apps). It's amazing. I didn't find it origionaly because it came out in 2017 and I was only looking at recent units, but it's still the best IMO. Wifi 5 vs 6 had virtually no impact on my real world needs. I can get 540Mbps on Synology wifi. Using two of there MR2200ac mesh units. The best compliment I can give is... it just works!.
I feel for the wifi 6 hype. I have a 1Gb internet and new phones. But wifi 5 at 500Mbps there is nothing I'm doing on my phone that needs more bandwith right now. All my desktops are wired 1Gb connections. This router gives me full 1Gb internet speed on LAN and 500Mb on wifi. I'm golden. Blown away by the ease and power of the Synology ecosystem. I ended up buying my first NAS too and it's amazing. Enjoying moving all my movies and files to it. DSM software is even better.
I'll wait for Syology to come out with a wifi 6 solution before I upgrade. I'm happy as can be with the current setup.
Again this is my situation, with a large family and lots of home workers (concurrent zoom meetings), I needed bandwidth control, family control, fast performance, and monitoring. Not everyone needs that. If your biggest concern is pure wifi speed and no other needs. For mesh I'd say the Orbi AX600 (amazing signal strength). For single router, Nighthawk AX12 fastest speed.
Solved ?? for Nighthawk RAX15
I found that, if you enable QOS then a new line appears on the QOS page that says "Click here to see bandwidth utilisation by device and application" A nice little bar graph shows up on each device and.. if you click on the device, you get a bar graph for each application (Youtube, Netflix, ...)
THANKS NetGear !!!!
Critical feature, it's killing me to miss it because my ISP throttles my upload and I can't tell which IOT device has been hacked and turned into a dDoS bot. Just add ONE LINE to the existing 'devices list' feature where you list 3 numbers, average usage per prev day/hour/minute for that device. It's tops 500 lines of C code and one new directory maybe 1k or less per device in storage. And that's assuming it's not already built into your openWRT and just now being shown by the webserver.
MANAGEMENT, are you listening? I'd told the first few people who asked me, to RUN and get this device because of its excellent WiFi. First time I needed this critical info I had the device for 1 month, since then I've been TURNING PEOPLE AWAY just word of mouth. Yes, not just nerds care.
250+ likes on this, only 1 in 20 will be reporting (for every one you see complain, there are 20-50 who don't). That means 5000+ people out there are dissing you by word of mouth. That is a lot of lost sales. HURRY UP THERE'S NO WAY THE IT/QA COSTS ON THIS WON'T PAY FOR THEMSELVES in a month. Please. You spent so much on engineering the WiFi, drop the other shoe (or at least, shoelace).
I've given up trying with Netgear and this feature request. Instead I set up OpenWrt with some spare hardware - sorted, although with some resentment
These are all great comments - thanks for following up on this thread. The problem (as far as I see it) is that this entire support community is an echo chamber. If anyone is within 90 days of purchase, please create a support request and just ask the support person to read this thread. I'm past 90 days, so I can't, but if you can - please do this to help provide visibility and to hopefully get some feedback.
It was frustrating but one gets used to it. I was hoping Netgear implements several functions during the last 4-5 years which have been requested from the community and are available on other (even lower cost) systems.
None of them has been implementend and I guess Netgear will not implement any requested features in the future.
So this community a waste of time and I assume Netgear is only providing this platform to pretend they listen to the users feedback.
Regarding Orbi it seems the router's spec is just to low to provide state of the art features at a premium price.Not that it will matter, but I'm still in my support window for my new AX6000 and I just submitted a support ticket for this. With three kids doing virtual school at home my bandwidth usage has skyrocketed. I need to know which devices are using the most.
