I purchase the Orbi RBK50 kit in hopes or solving the major wifi issues I'd had for a few years which was coverage and stability. I'd gone through multiple wifi routers from vairous other competitors, but always ended up with success in only one of the 2 major areas: a router with great coverage and poor stability or vice-versa. When I got Orbi it was buggy fr the first few months, but I stuck it out until the device became stable with the 2.x releases. When 2.1 rolled around with Ethernet Backhaul support, I knew this had been a great purchase until I tried to use this feature. In every attempt at trying to use the Ethernet backhaul, my entire network has become complete unstable. This meant poor wifi or no wifi signals, the router and satellite no longer talking to each other, the satellite switching between 2.4G, 5G and Ethernet randomly. In some case I had to do a factory reset just to get thing back to normal with the wireless backhaul.
What adds insult to injury is the fact, that I've purchases this same setup for family members to ease their burden of wifi coverage and stability and also offer an easier system to manage. Now we all are ready to jump ship because all the forced firmware updates appear to be blind shots at a dartboard to see what stick. Wifi is no longer stable, QoS is still a joke compared to the other products that even Netgear has released over the years let alone compared to the competition and attempting to setup Ethernet backhaul just leads to an extra hour of wasted time as you we try to recover from the flaky setup every time.
I've tried tweaking every feature in the wifi settings and have hunter for hidden menus here on the forums for the QoS settings, debug mode, and anything else I can find and still continue to have random issues that require a reboot of the router ever few days or weeks.
At this point, Netgear needs to to own up to the fact that these features are not well tested before pushing them out to the public. I see a ton of forum posts talking about the numerous issues with various things from forced firmware updates, lack of customization, power wifi stability, poor QoS managements, and unstable features like Ethernet Backhaul. Netgear has been around too long to push out a product like this with so many issues.
If anyone has had success with stabilizing their Orbi, PLEASE let me know. At this point, I'm starting to feel like I've wasted my money. And if anyone has recommendation on other mesh products that great success I'm all ears.
Model: RBK50| Orbi AC3000 High-Performance Tri-Band WiFi System
@thor17usa Literally in your same boat and I'm sorry to hear it. I puchased one for my home and recommended it to family too. Huge mistakes.
While the hard-core netgear fans will advise you to just stick it out and hope that the next firmware is better or to spend time talking to support, I'd like to offer a different suggestion. Cut your losses and walk. I've had my system for over a year and it was only stable for a few month period. The overwhelming majority of the time I owned the Orbi's some bug with the firmware was breaking something major. The most recent problem over the past 6+ months has been ebbing and flowing layer 2 backhaul issues that are terrible to track down.
The Unifi's are only a little more expensive and they just work. All the time. They are professional wifi. And the support is professional support, and the user base is well versed in specific issues. It's just a better scene - far less stressful.
If you have a wired option, I'd love to convince you to stop donating your time and effort to Netgear.
Model: RBK53| Orbi Router + 2 Satellites Orbi WiFi System
Thanks for the suggestion. It is good to know that Netgear is working to resolve the issues, but I feel like certain test scenarios are not being accounted for before releasing these updates. The community has asked Netgear to had a feature to block auto updates since shortly after lunch and for good reason I believe. In either case, I would be fine with installing the beta software, but not sure how to get on that list since you only get 90 days of e-mail support and that has expired already.
For as much as this product costs, I would just expect things to be more stable.
Has anyone had success in downgrading to any of the previous version and restoring the stability of the router and satellite?
