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Forum Discussion
device not connecting to closest satellite
It looks like many have a similar problem. I have an RBR50 along with 2 satellites. My router is on my main floor with 1 satellite upstairs and 1 satellite in the basement. In my master bedroom, I...
I have the exact same problem. 40 devices in the house typically connecting to the closest unit and system is mostly fast. HOWEVER, there is an exception with one desktop computer that seems to prefer the satellite versus the main unit. The satellite is two floors away on the other side of the house. The main unit is 20 feet away. If I unplug the satellite, the computer will happily connect to main unit with speeds around 100Mbs. If I then replug the satellite, within an hour, the computer will connect to it and I will get 500Kbps at best. And THEN sometimes the connection drops altogether but will not then reconnect to the main. It is terribly frustrating.
I have the same issue from time to time. I go to the device, forget the Wireless networks and re-connect. It always picks the strongest signal and stayus connected until the closest satellite goes offline for some reason.
This is the part where NetGear is really sloppy in terms of their service and product.
One- they want to charge for service on basic crap that should be part of buying their expense products.
Second - NetGear needs to be more proactiv in the forum and answer anything not answered within 72 hours. Sloppy, lazy, and cheap.
Now on to the issue. The internet connected devices do not connect to the closest ORBI device. They should create a way to move a device over the the ORBI main router or one of the satellites.
I look forward to a response eventually but afraid this will take some time. NetGear frequently disapppoints on this front.
- I have an RBR850 system and wondered this as well - when the system goes down and re-boots, the router comes on first and I assume devices try to latch onto the router as soon as it’s back up and running. Then when the satellites kick back on, the devices assume they don’t need to switch to the satellite, so they stay connected to the router, which is farther away and at the slower 2.4GHz band instead of 5GHz, which it could do. I sure wish I was reading solutions to this problem. Turning down the power seems counter-intuitive when the reason I bought this sytem was because of its power.
Ekcj wrote:
Then when the satellites kick back on, the devices assume they don’t need to switch to the satellite, so they stay connected to the router, which is farther away and at the slower 2.4GHz band instead of 5GHz, which it could do.The answer of the IEEE standardisation is Radio Resource Management (802.11k), specifically the Neighbor Request/Report feature.
Doing the Neighbor Request and evaluate the the returned “Neighbor Report” report containing information about neighboring access points (BSSIDs on the same SSID) which are known candidates for the client to re-associate with (should the client choose to do so). Therefore, the Neighbor Report request/report pair enables the client to collect information about the neighboring APs of the AP it is currently associated to and this information may be used as identification of potential candidates for a new point of attachment.
This does relief the client engaging in time consuming scanning activity - either actively probing for APs or passively listening to every channel for beacons - the client can instead narrow its list down to the known available neighbors. This is especially useful in environments where multiple WLANs (SSIDs) can be heard by the client
Further on, it will massively the client power consumption – the time taken by scanning (especially active scanning) also consumers battery power for the client. Since the 802.11k Neighbor Report provides information before roaming, less power may be consumed thanks to more efficient use of WLAN “air time”, read the active scanning it is not only time consuming from the client perspective resources (CPU load, memory, radio, etc.), it’s also about “air time” consuming.
For example, a client that is not neighbor aware (a non-802.11k compliant client) will likely engage in wildcard probe requests, where some clients will burst these. In this scenario, typically every AP that hears the probe request will generate a probe response. In other words, for a single client, a number N of APs will generate N probe responses. If multiple clients engage in wildcard probing, then the RF environment can quickly become “polluted” with management traffic simply because the clients are not using neighbor request. This has a negative impact for the entire WLAN. Stupidly enough: Even in the year 2021 there are still IoJ WiFi clients which avoid this very basic probing for various reasons (some lised above, but last but ot least just lazy implementation lucky enough to be able to find and talk to the first best AP they discover.. And I have not talked about the lack of 802.11k capabilities here yet....
Lack of known connection attempts to the better suited APs, a very wild idea would be randomly force a disconnect on lower signal level and quality clients. This would force these dumb (sorry saying) WiFi clients to re-scan the air for the best available band and BSSID AP. But this forced disconnect would not be considered as a very wise decision again...but this would likely make the dumb IoJ talk to the "best" suited AP.
Said that - and I know it's the answer some people don't like: Complain to the IoJ makers!
