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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
Seriously, how much effort would it take for a Netgear engineer to explain why this is more difficult than it would appear?
On the Idea Exchange page, Netgear lists a stunning total of 2 ideas implemented and 28 issues resolved - over six years!! Of the two implemented ideas, the top one had 197 votes. The other had 38 (!?!). This one is over 400 and climbing.
With such crappy customer service, I will neither be recommending nor purchasing another Netgear product.
netgear- get your crap together!
+1 Shame on me for not checking before I dropped coin on this.
4 years... and nothing. I've been hoping this would finally be addressed at some point but it appears I just need to face facts and begin the search for a replacement setup for my current orbi 1 router, 1 sat setup. Very disappointed.
Its obvious at this point Netgear has no interest of adding per device traffic visibility to the older Orbi's, those are dead sticks now that Orbi 6 is out. I'm just waiting for a nice thunderstorm to justify changing my mesh network to something else.
There is a chance I could snake the data through other third party ways based on the hardware i am using (outside of the orbi system) but Netgear isn't going to look at this, the idea has been around for 4 years and no feedback from them. But my idea involves throwing more money and hardware at the problem which should be accomplished with simple statistics on the router. Orbi wasn't designed to be administratively helpful. (only can use OpenVPN? )
Hoping to get off this e-mail list for the hopeless further additions to this ticket and product.
layterrrrrrrrr 🙂
Driedcherries You already wrote that and I refuted that. Denial is a river in Egypt? Or is this spam?... can't think of another reason why there would be link to a "anti fog paintball mask" in the answer.
- How Can I Monitor Bandwidth Usage of Each Device on Wifi Network?
- Go to your router settings.
- You'll see a page that contains information about each device connected to your network.
- Here, look for the connection status and IP address of each device.
- Also, check the amount of data being used by all the devices.
Regard:
Yeah, no. rdouma shows very clearly that the software from Netgear doesn't show this information. Also you can click on the device on that page but it only takes you to a page to rename the device. so yeah, no.
Driedcherries I suppose you're talking about this screen:
I don't see amount of data used per device here (and even if it would show it, it's only a meaningful number to me if I see it expressed against time, so in a graph...).
Mazuzu I doubt it... My impression of NetGear is that they don't really seem to care. After I bought it in November 2021 I discovered uPnP didn't report bandwidth after it reached MAXINT. Submitted a report and just got stuck in level 1 customer "support" where they kept insisting I would just spend hours on wiping my setup, factory resets and all that kind of bull**bleep**. Infuriating. I countered by asking them to provide me proof that they could get the counter past MAXINT but no, that was too much trouble, I just had to keep spending time to satisfy their little mindless checklist. That bug by the way was eventually solved. I guess some other sucker took the trouble to go through the hoops.
Then the admin page stopped working due to a firmware update. The support page didn't want to hear about it, because I had bought my router in November 2021 so obviously I wasn't entitled to let them know they broke their own router; I had the products for more than 3 months already so who was I to think I could use the support page to let NetGear know 🙄. Their Twitter account kept pushing the mindless "just do a factory reset and reconfigure everything" approach to all the victims while there was already a fix available where one had to mail a specific person at NetGear for for it to be pushed to my router... something I found by accident on Reddit.
So no, I don't particularly feel that NetGear has some kind of customer care policy that is aimed at collecting feedback and trying to make their stuff better.
Maybe if this post turns into a "let's promote competitor products that have this basic feature we want on Orbi" post, then Netgear will do something about this...
