Orbi via DSL - performance

[harre2001]

Hi there,

since one week I'm a (lucky) owner of a Orbi RBR50 with satellite. My desire to get this equipment was enormous and I had to wait for 6 weeks until delivery in Germany.

Now I'm back to reality:

1. it took me a while to find in the advanced settings the mode 'AP'. Especially in my country many people use routers from Deutsche Telekom with DSL and for my understanding the 'AP' mode is in that constellation the only way to get Orbi working correctly. Right or wrong? ... and if 'right' Netgear may add this to their quickstart guide to avoid further frustration.

2. after getting Orbi router and satellite up and running I'm disappointed about the bandwidth that comes to the satellite. I have a house with 3 floors, my network access with Deutsche Telekom is in the 2nd floor (and can't easily be changed), my smart TV is on the groundfloor and one of my key desires was 'get rid of this power-LAN from 2nd floor to ground floor).

results: WiFi performance for smart devices and laptop on groundfloor is ok, connecting the smart TV to the satellite with an Ethernet cable showed horrible results. When connecting the satellite to the router the top ring showed 'orange' which means 'fair' - for my understanding this should be fine, when I use a internet speed check tool (e.g. from Deutsche Telekom) it says that on the satellite I wll get avg. 28 MBit/s as download speed. For HD-TV it should be more than enough (at my access point the download speed is 50 mBit/s). For my smart TV I had to go back to power-LAN which is very disappointing...

Any ideas how I can improve performance?

What disadvantages do I have when I use 'AP-mode' (e.g. I can not prioritize or turn of the mulitmedia priorisation)

Thanks a lot, harre2001

[peteytesting]

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@harre2001 wrote:

Now I'm back to reality:

1. it took me a while to find in the advanced settings the mode 'AP'. Especially in my country many people use routers from Deutsche Telekom with DSL and for my understanding the 'AP' mode is in that constellation the only way to get Orbi working correctly. Right or wrong? ... and if 'right' Netgear may add this to their quickstart guide to avoid further frustration.

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hi

this depends on how you want to set up the two as yiou dont want to end up with 2 routers and dual nat and issues  caused by that so

you can bridge the dsl modem and run the orbi riouter connected behind it in pppoe mode ( if thats what you isp supports )

or

keep your isp modem running in router mode and have the orbi system behind it in AP mode

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@harre2001 wrote:

2. after getting Orbi router and satellite up and running I'm disappointed about the bandwidth that comes to the satellite. I have a house with 3 floors, my network access with Deutsche Telekom is in the 2nd floor (and can't easily be changed), my smart TV is on the groundfloor and one of my key desires was 'get rid of this power-LAN from 2nd floor to ground floor).

results: WiFi performance for smart devices and laptop on groundfloor is ok, connecting the smart TV to the satellite with an Ethernet cable showed horrible results. When connecting the satellite to the router the top ring showed 'orange' which means 'fair' - for my understanding this should be fine, when I use a internet speed check tool (e.g. from Deutsche Telekom) it says that on the satellite I wll get avg. 28 MBit/s as download speed. For HD-TV it should be more than enough (at my access point the download speed is 50 mBit/s). For my smart TV I had to go back to power-LAN which is very disappointing...

Any ideas how I can improve performance?

What disadvantages do I have when I use 'AP-mode' (e.g. I can not prioritize or turn of the mulitmedia priorisation)

---

you want to have the orbi router on the first floor and one sat on the 2nd floor and one sat on the ground  floor as the orbi system works like this

sat ---- router --- sat

with regard to AP mode when you set the orbi router to AP mode you then control everything from your upstream router

[harre2001]

So, after some more testing I can come back with the following learnings (and thank you very much for your helpful comments):

1. AP mode is probably the right solution as my service provider doesn't allow to bridge the DSL modem - and I won't come with the Orbi router into the internet.

2. I have removed the media receiver (from Deutsche Telekom) and instead of that I get Netflix and other movies via Apple TV, with satisfying results. Netflix + Youtube + Apple-Movie works all in parallel with the Orbi router - satellite connection

3. I have installed Netgear Genie on my Macbook and with the WLAN analysis tool I got technical confirmation that on the ground floor is still enough throughput for video streaming.

Initial frustration evolved to 'yes, now I have what I expected' and that is fine for me.