I purchase the Orbi RBK50 kit in hopes or solving the major wifi issues I'd had for a few years which was coverage and stability. I'd gone through multiple wifi routers from vairous other competitors, but always ended up with success in only one of the 2 major areas: a router with great coverage and poor stability or vice-versa. When I got Orbi it was buggy fr the first few months, but I stuck it out until the device became stable with the 2.x releases. When 2.1 rolled around with Ethernet Backhaul support, I knew this had been a great purchase until I tried to use this feature. In every attempt at trying to use the Ethernet backhaul, my entire network has become complete unstable. This meant poor wifi or no wifi signals, the router and satellite no longer talking to each other, the satellite switching between 2.4G, 5G and Ethernet randomly. In some case I had to do a factory reset just to get thing back to normal with the wireless backhaul.
What adds insult to injury is the fact, that I've purchases this same setup for family members to ease their burden of wifi coverage and stability and also offer an easier system to manage. Now we all are ready to jump ship because all the forced firmware updates appear to be blind shots at a dartboard to see what stick. Wifi is no longer stable, QoS is still a joke compared to the other products that even Netgear has released over the years let alone compared to the competition and attempting to setup Ethernet backhaul just leads to an extra hour of wasted time as you we try to recover from the flaky setup every time.
I've tried tweaking every feature in the wifi settings and have hunter for hidden menus here on the forums for the QoS settings, debug mode, and anything else I can find and still continue to have random issues that require a reboot of the router ever few days or weeks.
At this point, Netgear needs to to own up to the fact that these features are not well tested before pushing them out to the public. I see a ton of forum posts talking about the numerous issues with various things from forced firmware updates, lack of customization, power wifi stability, poor QoS managements, and unstable features like Ethernet Backhaul. Netgear has been around too long to push out a product like this with so many issues.
If anyone has had success with stabilizing their Orbi, PLEASE let me know. At this point, I'm starting to feel like I've wasted my money. And if anyone has recommendation on other mesh products that great success I'm all ears.
