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My wife and I both work from home and do several video calls per day, often at the same time. I previously had an RBR50 system (wifi 5) that I had used for years and had zero issues with for wired/ethernet. We did start to have some wifi issues I believe due to device saturation so I upgraded to the RBR850 (wifi 6). We have Spectrum 1G service (1Gbs down, 35-40Mbs up) working from a DOCSIS 3.1 modem (EN2251) with a 2.5g port.
This setup has worked rock solid for months, at least since September of last year. Both wifi and ethernet speeds have been solid as well as both my wife and I's video calls. Then a few months ago we started noticing some stuttering on calls, video cutting out, etc. We'd get warnings from the vid call apps (Meet, Webex, Zoom, Teams) that we had low bandwidth. When we first installed the wifi 6 router, I had checked speeds from wired and wireless devices and consistently got 900+Mbs on wired and 500-850Mbs on wifi (for wifi 6 capable devices). I still get excellent wifi speeds all over the house. However, now when I run the Ookla speedtest on a wired device like my desktop, it starts off as high as 600Mbs but drops to 200-300Mbs as the test runs, almost like it is saturating as it tests, even though the test is like 10-15 seconds. I tested this with our Windows and Mac laptops as well with the same results. Previously when I'd run this test it would start in that 600-700Mbs. range but get FASTER as it went, ending at 900-950Mbs down. So I immediately ran through several troubleshooting steps:
Tested speed on router under Advanced-Setup - 1150Mbs down, 41Mbs up
Connected desktop direct to cable modem - speeds of 950Mbs plus down, 35Mbs up. Just like it used to be and slower due to it only being a 1G NIC I assume. This leads me to believe the issue is the Orbi ethernet router.
Rebooted everything - no change
Downgraded firmware - no change
Switched ports for attached devices - long shot but no change
Upgraded cables to cat 6a STP 10G - no change
Disabled several features one at a time - NAT filtering to open, SIP ALG off, WMM off (I know it's wifi only but tried), UPNP, etc. with no change
Checked Network statistics on router page - Ports 1-4 solid 1000M/Full solid over an hour or so
Disabling or turning off all other wired devices and testing a single ethernet port - no change
Checked all attached devices - nothing
I'm at the end of my rope. It's been suggested to invest in a stand alone wired router which if I have to I may try but given this setup worked flawlessly on the previous Orbi and this one for several years, it sure seems like it is fixable. Can someone please help me diagnose this issue and hopefully fix it?
I see, that had reared it's ugly head again. Ya, there is a very LONG post thread over on DSLReports that was started many years ago about a Intel vulnerability with PUMA chip sets, one SB6190 was at the forefront of this discussion. There were other brands as well effected.
See if Spectrum supports any of the NETGEAR CM series of modems or maybe try a Motorola branded model. Not a fan of Arris or Hitron though I have one however it's only for phone services with the ISP.
What is the size of your home? Sq Ft? What is the distance between the router 📡 and satellite(s)🛰️? 30 feet or more is recommended in between RBR 📡 and RBS 🛰️ to begin with depending upon building materials when wired or wirelessly connected. https://kb.netgear.com/31029/Where-should-I-place-my-Orbi-satellite 🛰
Does this happen with the RBS turned OFF? Does this happen with both wireless and wired devices? What channel configurations are currently set on the router?
Try disabling the following and see: Armor, Smart Parental Controls or Circle, IPv6 and Traffic Meter.
Has a factory reset and setup from scratch been performed since last FW update?
Firmware - currently on latest, 7.2.6.31 though tried the last 2 older firmwares for testing
House - 3500 sqft, 2 story, satellite is roughly 25-30 ft away. Again though, no wifi issues (in fact wifi 6 devices are actually faster than wired, both on main (front of house) and satellite (back of house, outside/backyard). Is your thought that the backhaul could be struggling and somehow taking bandwidth, or more likely processing power, away from ethernet on the router? I've toyed with wiring the backhaul but given how strong the wifi performance is it didn't seem worth it.
RBS off - just checked, no change
Wireless/Wired - Wifi is rock solid, only issues are with wired. Note that I could use wifi for video calls on my laptop or buy a wifi 6 adapter for my desktop but given this worked for years previously, I'm still convinced there is ethernet issues to be solved.
Armor, IPv6, Traffic meter - We do use Armor and I disabled that, same ethernet results. We don't currently have IPv6 of traffic meter enabled.
I have not yet done a full factory reset but will try tonight when work is over. I have some port forwarding stuff and static IPs which I assume would be better to setup manually than reload a cfg file?
OK, did a full reset, tested at default settings - It was a bit faster at ~450Mbs down 40Mbs up but still half of what I was getting previously.
Re-setup all previous settings (static IPs, port forwards, etc.) - same as above.
So small improvement but I see that same odd behavior of the speed spiking high in the first second or two of the test then tapering off down to the 200's-400's. Super frustrating. We'll see if video calls are better tomorrow. Sigh.
The speed drop off is seen on both wired PC using Ooklas installable speed test app and the RBRs internal speed test app?
And to check, you do get the 1Gb speeds with a wired PC directly connected to the ISP modem?
Wondering if there is something going on in between the ISP modem and the RBR. Thought last time I had my 850 series online, I got 1Gb always, however that was with v.21 FW loaded and connected to a CAX80 gateway in modem mode and tested a CM3000 as well.
It's hard to tell on the RBR's internal ookla test as it doesn't show me any progress. But I get a much higher download result there (1100-1150Mbs) there vs. pretty much any way I run the same ookla test on my pc through ethernet meaning browser, installed app, etc. I did try cloudfare's speedtest which gives a lot more detail (https://speed.cloudflare.com/) which showed some interesting results. Down speeds were anywhere from 200-500Mbs but Packet Loss varied greatly. I've run the test 20ish times and seen packet loss as high as 1%. I can't test directly connected to the modem yet as my wife is on calls but will do so shortly. And yes, I did get much faster speeds connecting directly to the modem from my pc with the ookla test though I think the cloudfare test will give me a much better picture.
I did do some research more specific to the modem itself (Hitron Docsis 3.1 with Spectrum firmware) and it seems several folks have issues with that particular model which some attribute to the chipset (Puma 6 or 7? Not familiar). One user even said he specifically had issues with an Orbi with that modem, though it was the RBRE960. He had tested an eero and an Asus router and neither had the same speed drop. There was some data around sustained download speeds which seems to match what I'm seeing on speed tests run through devices connected through the Orbi. I'm going to try to see if I can swap the modem out for one with a different chipset or maybe even find a used modem on ebay or something to see if that helps. I'm so happy with the wifi performance on this Orbi that I'm not ready to give up on it yet without trying another thing or two.
I see, that had reared it's ugly head again. Ya, there is a very LONG post thread over on DSLReports that was started many years ago about a Intel vulnerability with PUMA chip sets, one SB6190 was at the forefront of this discussion. There were other brands as well effected.
See if Spectrum supports any of the NETGEAR CM series of modems or maybe try a Motorola branded model. Not a fan of Arris or Hitron though I have one however it's only for phone services with the ISP.
So I swapped out my EN2251 at Spectrum but they gave me a ES2251 (rather than the EU or ET with the different chipsets). I still gave it a shot since that was all that they had but not surprisingly, the results were the same.
Then today was randomly searching ebay, amazon warehouse, etc. for docsis 3.1 modems and sifting through countless listings for EN and ES modems, I ran across a guy selling his Netgear CM1200 for cheap which is supported by Spectrum. I just got it home and plugged in and called Spectrum to activate it as it wouldn't activate through their site. They did have to "manually" add the MAC but once they did I was up and running. I now get the expected full speed for wired devices (900+ Mbs), tested a 1G download and it was 80-90 MB/s as it was before, streaming seems stable. Hooray!
So still not sure if it was the modem's connection to Spectrum or the Orbi's connection to the modem but regardless, the modem was seemingly the issue. There are tons of Netgear, Arris, Motorola, etc. modems for sale on ebay in the $30-$50 range. If anyone is having similar issues I would recommend giving one of them a shot. Just make sure their model number is on the list here - https://www.spectrum.net/support/internet/compliant-modems-charter-network
Thanks again for your help @FURRYe38 and hopefully this thread helps someone else some day.
