Is the Orbi right for me?

[jrdawson]

I am thinking about buying the RBK44.  But here is what I want to do... 
Currently I have a linkys wireless router and two linksys wifi repeters that create there own seperate wifi networks.  But each of the networks that the repeaters make is just a siwtched network so all devices on all networks can still see each other.  That said it is an ulgy support mess and the repeters don't always work and I am getting really sick of dealing with wifi issues.  The wired aspect is fine so I am not 100% sure I want to replace that main router but I could.

I have two main questions...  First if I connect my main Orbi to my existing router and I turn off all wifi functionality on my existing router. Can I use the Orbi to create a nice big mesh wifi network that will be a siwtched network on the same class C address space as my existing wired network. Having all the clients on the Orbi get DHCP from my existing Linksys router?

My final question is more general... I know many folks on here are on this page because they have had problems with the Orbi for one reason or another.  My question is knowing all you know now would you still recomend and buy an Orbi again or did you just transfer one set of support porblems for another set?  

I am looking at buying the biggest orbi system (not the fastest) the one that has 1 main unit and 3 repeters so I will have over kill coverage in my house. 🙂

[Roamabout]

Your scenario is just like mine and the Orbi router in AP mode with two sat's will as you say give you an extended wifi network with a single SSID and a single management interface. In AP mode all the Orbi router functions will be disabled and DHCP will continue to come from the ISP router.

For me the Orbi has done everything I hoped, others here are so PO'd they want to sue Netgear. I proceeded despite this forum and decided it was worth a chance to get what I considered the best hardware. Depending on where you buy from you will have a return window typically 90 days to a year.

[jrdawson]

That sounds great... I am in Canada so I have limited purchase options so I will likely buy form Amazon.ca.  Not sure what they have as a return policy on this...

What is the primary issue most people are having with the Orbi. 

[Roamabout]

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@jrdawsonwrote:

That sounds great... I am in Canada so I have limited purchase options so I will likely buy form Amazon.ca.  Not sure what they have as a return policy on this...

What is the primary issue most people are having with the Orbi. 

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Some people, the ones that tend to gravitate to this forum, have experienced random reboots, random disconnects, performance drop offs. Some of them blame recent firmware updates and want Netgear to provide an option to disable updates. Some of the blame goes to devices that have caused many router products to crash due to poor bahavior with some Android devices. The android issues (phones, Google home, Chromecast etc) seem to have been fixed by Google updates.

I have all of those devices and more on my network and have seen none of the problems so far. There are a lot of smart people here, some with deep networking experience and we still cant figure out why some people with large complex networks have no issues and others cant keep a reliable system running for more than 2 mins.

[FURRYe38]

To help troubleshoot some of these issues, try disabling Beamforming and MIMO and IPv6. 

Set Manual channels 1, 6 or 11 on 2.4Ghz. 

Set WPA2 and AES only. 

I use these settings and have had zero issues. I presume there maybe some bad interaction behavior on the part of some Google devices here and there. Helps to give these features a try after disabling them.