Maximum Satellites: 5 Working

Good analysis!  

FWIW, we've never said it wouldn't work.  One thing to keep in mind: the wireless backhaul is shared bandwidth among all the Satellites. The more Satellites you add, the less bandwidth is available for each Satellite to connect to the Router.  This is, obviously, mitigated using Ethernet Backhaul.  

Orbi Product Management (Residential)

Hello  Ivan_Liew and congratulations on your successful setup of Orbi Pro + 5 satellites  and sharing your experience and thoughts with us. I would like to provide a couple of comments here regarding Orbi Pro.

The comments about the need to turn routers or satellites off and on, are not necessarily correct. When the Orbi Pro router is in discovery mode, i.e. ‘sync’, it does the handshake process with one satellite at a time and each satellite has a time out clock and if it doesn't receive a handshake attempt response from a router, it will go back to its normal state.

Since the handshake takes some time for the router and satellite to complete their negotiation and establish a link, if you have multiple satellites in 'sync' mode, some of them will time out and you need to initiate the 'sync' process again for them.

In summary, if you have say 6 satellites that you need to sync with the router, it is best to do it 2 at the time. There is no need to turn anything off and on again. Just go through your satellites 2 at the time and sync them all.

Further, during the past year, we have done significant amount of lab and field testing and improvements with the Orbi family of products and as you have validated it yourself, it can easily cover a large space with 6 or 7 satellites. Please note that these satellites can be a combination of both indoor and outdoor satellites and you can have them in wired, wireless and daisy chain mode. Mix and match as you see fit.

Hope this answers the question about the number of satellites and how to sync them.

Finally, we love to hear from you all with any success stories like this.

Orbi Pro Product Management 

Thank you NetGear support for giving additional info. This is the clearest "official word" and explanation about adding 6-7 satellites I have seen thus far.  

We are also running the guest network and will try the options of regular login or FaceBook WiFi. The login page sometimes doesn't appear or is slow, but after that the guest network seems to run well. 

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@Ivan_Liew wrote:

I have just completed setup of our Orbi Pro system with 1 Router + 5 Satellites, providing coverage across 4 floors of our entire church building. Before we went this route, I had searched for "maximum satellites" as there are reports of 4,5,6 satellites working despite the official word from Netgear still being only 3 satellites. True enough, it can be done and the community recommendation is when connecting your 4th satellite and 5th etc.,  shut down all satellites and power off/on your main Orbi router. Then add 4th satellite, power off satellite, power off/on router again, add 5th satellite, power off satellite, repeat. Finally turn on main router, and all satellites!

 

My 5 satellites are working in star topology, combination of wired and wireless. Initially one connected as daisy-chain (so that feature works), but then later it showed up as star topology. I have confidence to add a 6th satellite if we ever deem it necessary to widen coverage or increase throughput in certain areas. So I guess no one really knows the maximum as I haven't heard of someone trying to add a 7th and say it can't be done.

 

I am writing this to help others who may think of using Orbi Pros in a larger setup like this. Though the satellites are not cheap, the fact they come with mounting brackets, ease of wired or wireless installation, guest network, and ability to self-install without vendor makes it quite a good deal. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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