I posted this in the Orbi forum as well not sure where to have the thread...
Im trading my Nighthawk X6 (which I love) b/c I'm moving from an apt to a 2 story house. I bought both the Obri AC3000 with satellites and a Nighthawk S8000. I do alot of gaming so I'd like to utilize the port priority feature for those particular connections. That being said I have a few questions:
1. From what I read you're supposed to go Line > Orbi > Switch. Will I be able to get the full benefit of the S8000 with this?
2. My connection speed is 200MB right now which seems to be plenty. Do I need the S8000 or is that complete overkill? Would a normal lower cost switch work OK here?
3. I have seen some discussion on hardwire backlog/backdoor channel for Orbi. Not sure if this has been added with new firmware, but assuming I want to set it up for wired back, what would be the way I do this? Line > Orbi > Switch > Satellite1/Satellite 2?
Thanks for the question. I think the answers are fairly straightforward:
The strength of the s8000 is to provide you with additional ports and allow you to easily specify applications for each of the ports to optimize traffic flow through the switch.
Therefore, if the Orbi base has enough ports in the right location to support your hardwired connections, then you don't need to put a switch into the mix. On the other hand, if you have to run a fair distance to connect to more than one hardwired device, the best (full speed) alternative is to run a cable from the Orbi base to a switch and then fan out to your hardwired devices. The S8000 (Nighthawk switch) makes that easy to configure, provides the best possible performance and looks good doing it.
The Orbi Satelite will provide you four ports without having to run a cable but while Orbi consistently ranks as the highest performing backhaul wifi system on the market, it still is probably not going to be consistently faster than a gigabit hard line. As for when/if Orbi will support a hard line backhaul, I can't comment on that.
So it really comes down to how many hardwired devices you have and how close they are to the Orbi base.
