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Status:
New Idea
Please provide more 5GHZ wifi channel options - restricting to channels 36-48 is too limiting
I live in London in the UK and nearly every house nearby has wifi and growth of 5GHZ routers is growing rapidly - the WiFI explorer application on my Mac is picking up at least 13 wifi signals on channels 36-48 and around half of those have a signal strength of over 50% in my house. But there are hardly any routers using the 52-64 channels. Now I understand Orbi uses some of the 5GHZ channels for the backhaul, but surley there is enough space above channel 48 to support the backhaul and allow a 5GHZ wifi signal for devices so you can get a more reliable and stable connection on 5GHZ - which is the whole point of having a fast 'mesh' router as all my main devices support 5GHZ and I have a 200Mpbs broadband connection. But the interference in the 5GHZ channels means my devices often default back to 2.4GHZ channels which kills the speed I can get down to around 50-70Mpbs vs the full 200Mpbs possible on the 5GHZ channel.
I used to have a Apple Airport Extreme and to be honest it could deliver a better 5GHZ signal throughout my whole house because it could use channels above 48 - and that was having the Airport on the ground floor and I live in a three-story house made of brick walls and the signal would reach the loft just fine!
Please Orbi team try and fix this as it is a major design flaw for most people in busy urban areas with lots of routers in the 5GHZ band - I don't really mind if it's a manual option or the Orbi is more intelligent and can automatically shuffle around use of the 5GHZ channels for the back-haul and wifi, but restricting use of wifi to just 4 channels makes the system no better than an Airport Extreme that is over 5 years old for my use case - hardly cutting edge performance as Negear claim and it is definately not living up to the marketing strap line of "Better Wifi. Everywhere"!
41 Comments
I agree with this comment. Living in an urban area with lots of wireless routers in use. Providing the ability to change the channel would be great. I bought an Orbi to solve my deadspots in the house but without channel selection I've run into other problems.
- Agree, even with free low end wifi router that comes with your internet plan, I can change the 5Ghz channels to anything I want.
Come on Netgear...when are you going to respond to this issue as this community is littered with customers asking for this feature. I submitted the idea in April and now 6 months later still no response. What's the point of opening an ideas forum if you can't even be bothered to respond to customer feedback for ideas? Not impressed with Netgear's management of this forum at alll. Please try much harder.
On and just spotted that out of the 176 new ideas submitted you've only reviewed 14 and implemented 1! The stats speak for themselves.
Oh and just spotted that out of the 176 new ideas submitted you've only reviewed 14 and implemented 1! The stats speak for themselves.
Totally agree!
Understood that the band is also shared with backhaul connectivity, but the system should be smart enough to select the most suitable channels depending on the surrounding radiations.
Understood also that in most countries those channels should not be manually selected and should follow the DFS and TPC principles but that should be possible to implement in a "smart" system like Orbi. Many low end routers nowadays have such a feature.
Furthermore, I can see that my Orbi system is always using channel 108 for the backhaul network.
I have a neighbour who also has an Orbi system and I can see that his system also uses channel 108 for backhaul and I see that his signals are quite strong at my house (RSSI -71 and -80 dBm).
I'm sure that our networks are distrubing each other and I think this is one of the issues that makes my backhaul not stable.
It should be wise that Orbi either automatically chooses a free channel (there are many other unused channels to choose from!!!) or let us choose a channel (probably not allowed to be selectable in certain countries).
I couldn't agree more. I was 'surprised' to find out only the lower 5Ghz channels are used. Higher channels should be opened since most 5Ghz routers in my neighborhood are in the lower channels. Especially where backhaul is concerned, this gives a lot of interference.
I too live in an urban area and was looking to replace my AirPort Extreme gen 5 with a mesh setup, only to find that it was actually much slower due to poor choice of 5Ghz channels and other related factors.
If you think having only 36-48 to choose from (same as AirPort, as the coveted 52-100 can only be auto-selected through reboot lottery, at least on the Scandinavian version), imagine having no control at all which is true for Google WiFi and D-Link Covr. I use the former, and not only does it always auto select the worst possible channel (36) every time (some neighbor has 72% channel strength on 36 in my home), it also propagates 4 instances of itself on 36 as it does the ‘backhauling’ on its main channel. As a result, performance is less than 50% of the 5+ year old Apple base station.
So Netgear isn’t behind the curve in this regard, in fact they’re ahead by offering any channel control at all. I’m starting to think the answer isn’t any of these boutique-stylish mesh units, but one of those tacky looking black/red gaming routers with a hundred antennas — I’m sure those allow for some borderline illegal custom settings that us city folk need to elbow our way through the crowded airwaves...
Please keep hassling Netgear to add more 5ghz channels or at least ask them explain the logic of why they won't do it. I've had the idea on here for over a year and it's still showing as "new" and Netgear have sent me nothing in response....no "thanks for the idea we'll be back in touch" or "it's being reviewed by our dev team"....very poor service and customer engagement. You really do have to question why Netgear have an customer driven 'ideas exchange' and then proceed to ignore over 99% of all the ideas! If you look at the stats as of today there are nearly 400 ideas submitted and they have implemented 1, with over 300 of these showing as 'new ideas' that have not even been reviewed/evaulated yet!
