Orbi / Raspberry Pi : Wild pings and drops

[BrainSuperGlue]

Since moving to the Orbi system, connectivity to my Raspberry Pi on 2.4GHz has been flaky.

If I run a ping test to it, I get 1ms - 2ms - 800ms - Request dropped - 50ms - 1ms - 300ms - 5ms - 120 ms- Request dropped and so on.

If I manage to SSH on to the Pi, I can type some characters and then it stalls and later you can type again.

It looks like the Orbi and the Pi aren’t handshaking a WPA2 connection well

The Pi is fine.

Using Orbi firmware 2.1.2.18

Any thoughts?

Thanks

BSG

[ama1942]

The PI is fine ?

https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/4khah3/painfully_slow_wifi_on_pi_3/

i used to have a pi and the WiFi was not fine 

[st_shaw]

You didn't say what version Pi you have and whether the WiFi is built-in.  The small WiFi dongles typically sold for use with the RPi are junk.  Get a better WiFi dongle with an external antenna or better yet, use wired Ethernet. 

[martyfp]

I have a PI running as a small NAS server.  It has a cheap Edimax AC wifi dongle (no external antenna) and it works just fine with the orbi.    I did a ping test on it after it was set up and got 100% over a long period (prob about 24h) with mainly normal looking response times.  I have not tested again recently but it's been working faultlessly ever since.

[BrainSuperGlue]

The Pi is a Pi Zro Original. It's a timelapse camera and nowhere near Ethernet or I would have used that. The thing is that the Nano 2.4 adapter worked fine with the old Asus Wifi Router I used to use before the Orbi which makes me think that the wifi chipsets of the Nano 2.4 and the Orbi don't like each other. 

The other thing is despite being much closer to an Orbi satellite than to the Orbi router, the Pi keeps connected to the Router at a much lower signal.

Maybe it's that, maybe the wifi handshake is fine but it's the distance that is causing the issue and I have to find a way to make it talk to the Orbi Satellite.

As a backup I do have a 5GHz only Nano adapter which may keep the Orbi radios happier that could use.

[st_shaw]

The cheap, nano USB dongle WiFi adapters do not have the broadcast power nor adequate antenna size to connect at decent data rates. They will only connect at a few Mbps, and will be subject to drops due to poor signal strength.  If you were using a WiFi system that showed the Tx and Rx link rates of clients, you could see this.  

As I said, get a larger WiFi dongle with external antennas to overcome this.

Also, using a 5 GHz only nano-sized dongle will likely make things worse, because 5 GHz doesn't travel as far as 2.4 in the home.

Lastly, your Pi will not roam between APs.  It will connect to the first AP it sees.  So, if you ever reboot Orbi, or lose power, the Orbi router will boot up first, and the Pi will connect to the router and stick to that.  So, reboot your Pi (or remove and re-insert the WiFi dongle) and the Pi should connect to the satelllite (if it's closer.)