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Need Basement Help
Due to COVID constraints my wife has begun teaching her classes from home via Google Meets. She set up a nice work area in our finished basement, but had trouble with our WIFI there. After reading h...
- It won't allow me to use channel 36. Each time I attempted to do so the number in the box went back to 40. I've set the 5G devices variously at 40, 44, and 48. Doesn't seem to make an appreciable difference.
On phones, yes, we got good signal in the basement prior to installing the RBS. This is the first time we've tried using a laptop there.
May I ask a question? Yesterday my wife disconnected the laptop and took it to a meeting. This morning when the WIFI was weak, I noticed that the ORBI Outdoor satellite was turned off on the app. I toggled it back on and things improved. Would the fact that she disconnected, then reconnected WITHOUT REBOOTING have something to do with the satellite turning off? Just a thought.
May I ask a question? Yesterday my wife disconnected the laptop and took it to a meeting. This morning when the WIFI was weak, I noticed that the ORBI Outdoor satellite was turned off on the app. I toggled it back on and things improved. Would the fact that she disconnected, then reconnected WITHOUT REBOOTING have something to do with the satellite turning off? Just a thought.
MichaelParks26 wrote:
I noticed that the ORBI Outdoor satellite was turned off on the app. I toggled it back on and things improved..
As FURRYe38 commented, I am not aware of any method in the Orbi app to "toggle" the outdoor satellite on or off. Only "devices" can be paused in the app.
Does the RBS50Y appear on the Orbi 'app' as a satellite connected to the router with a dotted line?
- Yes, it's on the dotted line. As for the other, this morning the Outdoor ORBI panel of the app said the Outdoor ORBI was turned off. I don't know why. I clicked on the panel and in a few seconds it turned back on. She uses a program called "GoGuardian" to check each student's login and see that they're engaged. This is what's running sluggishly. She has the laptop screen and 2 monitors functioning, with a minimum of 5 active tabs, sometimes 7 or 8 active tabs. I was wondering about a bandwidth problem, but the system worked just fine when she ran it upstairs with only 1 monitor.
MichaelParks26 wrote:
the system worked just fine when she ran it upstairs with only 1 monitor.How do you hook up two additional monitors to one laptop?
If the error message is coming from GoGuardian, perhaps she could ask them what causes the message to appear (and the students to complain of audio/video problems)?
How many students are on a typical session when this happens?
- One monitor plugs into an HDMI port on the laptop itself. On the other side of the laptop she has installed a dock and the 2nd monitor is plugged into the rock's HDMI port.
The error message comes from Google Meets. When it was a problem this morning there were 10 students to be monitored. She says that other classes go as high as 20 students, however. - *dock's*
On my laptop when I click on the WiFi name, it brings up a screen that displays which WiFi channel the connection is on and the transmit/receive rate of the WiFi connection.
Does this laptop to something similar?
- It reads channel 48, 100% strong, 866Mbps.
- Channel 1 is my strongest connection, but all channels show a 100% signal. I couldn't understand how to change it from channel 48 by the Netgear support pages.
This looks more and more like the WiFi network is not the issue. 100% and 866 is the "best it gets" for 5G WiFi.
The satellite has a "Good" backhaul connection to the upstairs router, which in Orbi terms is nearly that fast.
200mb Internet 'down' is also fine.
The only networking suspect I see is the 11mb 'up' . According to Google Meets, you should need only 3.1mb/s uplink. But.... the internet results I got talked in terms of number of participants up to 10 at 4mb/s:
Question: is the Google Meets session SD Video quality or HD video quality?
I wonder if it would be useful to conduct an experiment when she is on-line. Do a SpeedTest on a different device. The uplink portion of a SpeedTest takes less than 15 seconds.
Another silly question: Do all students complain about audio/video issues, or only certain students?
(Yet another) Does the number of monitors have any effect on the situation?
The only way to definitely rule out the satellite is to haul everything upstairs and do a session using the router directly. (That would be an enormous chore.)
- Thank you. I've tried changing the channel for her laptop, but it doesn't seem to improve things. There are only 4 channels I can use: 36, 40, 44, 48. None of them seem to make a difference. The best status I can get is "Good." The others say "Average."
My memory of the way 5G WiFi works is that setting the channel to 36 means to use 'only' 36. Setting it to 48 means to combine 36-40-44-48 into one 80mb wide channel. (I have lost track of the reference where I heard that. Will search.) One way to tell is to look at that laptop WiFi report. What does it show when the Orbi is set to 36?
- It won't allow me to use channel 36. Each time I attempted to do so the number in the box went back to 40. I've set the 5G devices variously at 40, 44, and 48. Doesn't seem to make an appreciable difference.