Occasional blue light on satellite

[mikew_nt]

It looks like replying is turned off on the posts that mentioned similar issues, so please forgive me opening up a new posts.

I installed a few weeks ago and everything has been running great.   On current firmware, have not manually installed the one that came out very recently.  We are very impressed with the Orbi. 

However, a couple of nights around 10pm I've walked into the bedroom where the satellite is located to find that the blue LED ring is on.

I've never seen it go amber or magenta, so I don't know if it's ever appeared or not.

I've never lost connectivity or had any sort of buffering or other issues with anything connected to the satellite (wireless or hardwired).

The satellite always shows connected at 5g and status "good" (wireless backhaul).  I've run speed test using a crappy laptop on a long Cat5 cable and gotten 300mbps from one of the Ethernet ports.  The satellite isn't in a great spot (that's why it's there...), but it's not in a bad spot either.

I tried looking in logs, but it looks like logs only store some very high level events, nothing super low level like device connects/disconnects that I could see.

Thoughts?

Thanks for any help.

[FURRYe38]

Whats the distance between the satellite and main router? Feet? Recommended starting distance is 30 feet. I have one at 40 feet opposite ends of the house.

Any other wifi neighbors near by? If so, how many?

[mikew_nt]

One floor down and one room over.  It's typically not been a great room for wireless reception (again, why we bought the Orbi :)), but it's in a reasonably good corner.  I would say total distance is probably 30 ft, but that's really quite a small distance when you come down to it if an Orbi pair is supposedly good to 4000 sq ft.

As far as neighbors, I'm in a technologically astute neighborhood with small lots, so there's a fair amount of wifi in the air, but it has not presented a huge issue for me.

The fact that I'm connected at 5g and getting what I would guess are reasonably good backhaul speeds I think would indicate that the connection is decent, thus wondering what other steps I can take.

[FURRYe38]

Might try placement in different location to see if same thing still happens.

Might try setting manual channel 1, 6 or 11 on 2.4Ghz, which ever one is used less by your nieghbors.

Might try a factory reset on the satellilte, and re-add it.

[mikew_nt]

Thanks for the suggestions Furry, but I have a seemingly stable 5g connection, so I'm not going to start messing with that, or just do guessing things like moving it, esp given it happens every couple days and I can't stand over it looking at it.

Rather than just guessing at things, I'd like to go about this in a more organized troubleshooing manner, would be great if a Netgear person could jump in with some ideas and/or confirmation this is a bug. 

I have got to imagine that given the randomness and the apparent no loss of coverage I have, there may be a ton of people out there either not noticing this, or not bothering to report.  Would be good to hear from NG on this.

[st_shaw]

The blue light will reportedly come on when the satellite switches between 2.4 and 5 GHz backhaul.

I suspect your 5 GHz wireless backhaul connection is marginal, and is switching bands occassionally. Wireless signals will very substantially over time, so the GUI report of a good connection is just a snapshot in time. You would need a substantial signal margin to completely avoid temporary issues, and the Orbi has no quantitative report of the backhaul strength.

The backhaul uses the same frequencies and channels as any other WiFi device, so if you have the satellite in a location in your house that's problematic for WiFI, the backahul will experience the same issues.

If everything works, you could ignore it. If the light bothers you, or you encounter perfromance issues, you might want to move the satellite to a better location, that's closer or has fewer walls between.  Sometimes a few feet is all it takes.

[FURRYe38]

If you and when you choose to move it. Just remember you can put it back in same place. Just remember where you head it is all.