Plaster Walls - Orbi Fails

[Ricwest]

My house was built in 1949 and I used to have Apple Extreme and Express, 3 total. My house is only 1245 sq ft. 

1) The Orbi signal is pretty good, but it drops and constantly needs to be reset or synced just to get it to do the basics.

2) The speed is inconsistant and very often I'll have a strong 5 bars yet I can connect to anything... Speedtest won't even find a server. 

3) Cable model connection is solid.  200/20 it has not been a problem. 

4) While the Apple occationally gave me headaches, after spending $345. I feel like I got the wrong tool for a plaster walled home and would love a refund. Nobody mentioned how poorly the system performs with plaster walls.

5) I can't run ethernet to the satellite either, so even if I could, I can't even feed the signal to the second unit. 

Question: How do I penitrate these walls? Small house yet no perfomance. 

[st_shaw]

I also have a house built in 1949 with plaster and cinderblock walls.  It's abut 1500 SF and I can cover it fine using two wired access points. (From Ubiquiti)  The 5 GHz WiFi signal hardly makes it into the next room, but the 2.4 GHz travels farther.

Your best bet would be the same type of setup (wired APs.)  However, I would expect you could achieve Ok coverage using Orbi.  You need to place the router and satellite such that they can make a solid 5 GHz backhaul connecton to each other.  That means putting them closer together, or with minimal (preferably no) walls between them.  Maybe you could put them closer together towards the middle half of the house, then let the 2.4 GHz serve the outer reaches of the house.

[tucsontico]

My house is built with concrete block as the shell. The interior walls are framed with 2x4s and covered in drywall. Additionally, the house has heavy "hock & trowel" plastering over the drywall for texture. Finally the oustide finish of the house is stucco. I currently have no difficulty getting a signal 2.4 gHz signal all the way outside my house to my pool equipment about 75' from the ORBI base satation. I also get decent WiFi to my solar panel controller nearly 80' away from the satellite through three concrete block walls. 

One of the hints recently mentioned on this forum was to do an NVRAM reset and after that do a factory default reset. When those two are complete, reconfigure your ORBI as you want but do it manually. DO NOT USE any saved configuation files to reconfigure your ORBI. Additionally, after the reset/reconfigure DO NOT USE the built-in Speedtest on the QOS setup page. Apparently, that test mode is causing some users to have slow-downs and other anomolies.

Having said all that, I'm not a WiFi expert by any stretch of the imagination. I'm merely trying to help out with some potential fixes. Overall, I've been pleased with the performance of the ORBI system in my environment. There are still issues in my system too but nowhere near as many as other folks continue to report. Good luck!