No Ability to Daisy Chain AX6000 (two satellites)

You can try upping the power on the RBR to 50% at some point and see if the chain still remains. 

Possible some tuning on the DC feature maybe needed. However there maybe other factors that contribute to the RBS stopping the chain and reverting back to start for some reason. Distances, signal and noise. 

I would open a support ticket regarding this and inlude this forum thread for NGs review. 

https://www.netgear.com/support/product/wbc502.aspx#

Christian_R 

ErnestTheGreat 

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Rogelio1 wrote:
So I tried dropping the power to 25% and that sent the cabana sat into daisy chain with the office sat reliably. Not tenable or practical tho.

I did bust out my 100ft cat6 cable and tethered the router to the office sat. Magic — it decided the cabana should daisy chain to the office sat without any second thoughts. So far it’s been connected reliably this way for the last 15 minutes (which is 5x as long as when it’s an entire wireless backhaul and it reverts from daisy chain to split).

I’m going to keep the Ethernet tether going for a day and see if the cabana remains reliably tethered in daisy chain to the office. If so, I’m just going to get the handyman to route the cat8 cable under the house to join the living room router and office sat together and call it a day.

In summation, the logic on the Ax6000 unit with two sats and a totally wireless backhaul is faulty. I would not buy this unit in its current firmware state if planning to have a linear daisy chain with two sats — it’s highly inconsistent and defaults to worse bandwidth decisions on joining to the router when sat-sat chaining is actually preferable.

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FYI, there are tools to run burried cable under concrete and stone work. 

They make hole plates and fill in caulk for putting on holes and cables in exterior walls. 

Let us know how it goes. 

Realized it would be quite hard to run a line into the cabana because it would have to go underground (like drill under paver stones which isn't possible) or run through a dog-run alley or the backyard visibly.  Would also have to drill into the exterior of the cabana to get the cable in.  Basically no way to run the cable without it traversing an open walked path.

In my opinion if a sat is hard-wired to the router and another sat is introduced... the additional sat should always connect to the unit which has the strongest signal (whether it be the sat or the router).Logic would dictate that if that first sat is in the middle of a new sat and the router, it should then bond to the satellite and not the router because the throughoutput of the hard-wired sat would be near-equivalent to the router, sans the extra distance and weaker signal.

I already have an old 100 foot cat6 cable, so I'm going to test hard-wiring the router to the sat in the office (draging it across the hallway -- which my wife will love)... then seeing if the other sat in the cabana is smart enough to bond to the office sat... or if it still tries to connect all the way to the main router. If the former, then I'll keep the AX6000... if it doesn't, then I'm going to plug back in the older AC3000 set and see if it does correctly daisy-chain to the hard-wired sat (presumably it will... because it did before without being hard-wired).  There's less incentive for me to keep the AX6000 with hard-wiring the office sat (because I don't have any Wifi6 devices yet)... but even less reason to keep it if it's not even daisy-chaining to the hard-wired office sat which is closer and would provide the fastest connection.

You can do that as well. 
You can consider this as well:

RBR>Wired to>Gb LAN switch where 1st RBS location is<1st RBS wired to switch. 

                                                                                           <Wire from switch to Cabana location<>Wire RBS here.

You can even place another switch in the cabana location as well then connect the RBS to this switch if you really want flexible connections or in case the RBS fails in the future. 

Would it make much of a difference if the cabana satellite was connected to the other sat that's ethernet backhauled versus running the line direct from the router?  It's a bit easier to run the line from the office to the cabana than having to run another one the whole distance from the living room to the cabana.

CAT6A is also is very thick / shielded.

I would put in a line to the remote location if you feel that would work better for you. Might be worth having a wired line out there anyways as primary or backup connection.

https://www.cablesys.com/updates/cat6-cat6e-cat6a-differences/

https://www.lanshack.com/cat6a.aspx

I put UTP in my new addition a few years ago. I'm ready for 10Gb. :smileyvery-happy:

About your question, I have no experience as my wired satellite was the farthest one.

About wireless vs. cable backahul, in theory a 5GHz AX wireless is faster (up to 2400 Mbps on Orbi AX, 4804 Mbps on Asus ZenWifi AX) vs. 1000 Mbps, but the wireless connection has to be very good.

If speed is a primary target, w/o testing it's impossible to choose.

Anyway, cable has less latency.

I would do CAT6A under and inwall to wall plate jacks. CAT6A is more robust for under and in wall cable runs. How far is the cabana location from the house? With in 200 feet? If so, why not have a cable guy run a CAT6A out there and then wire your RBS up there. 

Not sure about ethernet vs wireless detect on the RBS. I presume the RBS probably doent' care just as long as there is a signal to connect to. The RBS ethernet connected would handle the wired backhaul change and traffic there. 

Try the power level change to see. Mine maintained DC configuration for the couple of hours with out changing configuration back to Star.

I presume there is distance, signal and environmental factors that are causing your condition as well. 

IF that fails, return it and get something that works for you. Suspect and actuality are two different things. 

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Rogelio1 wrote:
Haven’t tried the transmit power edits. I did try moving all three to the same room and resetting. Not surprisingly the says bonded to the router. Disconnected and put back into respective rooms one by one. Same problem as before. The furthest sat will show for the first minute it’s daisy chained to the other sat and backhaul for both is “good”. A minute later when I check both backhauls show poor and each sat is bonded to the router (even the far one) at 5Ghz.

The decision making of how the second sat is pairing makes no sense to me whatsoever. On the verge of returning these to Netgear — I suspect there was a reason why they didn’t sell second satellites for about 6 months (and I think it’s because their firmware logic is inconsistent at best and garbage at worst)

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Without testing it's hard to say what actually means "poor" in terms of transfer rate, in comparison with a "good" daisy chain connection.

But IMHO one thing is sure: the double wireless hop due to the daisy chain topology increases a lot the latency, so this could seriously affect some applications like on-line games, video conferencing, etc.

So the solution choosen by the Orbi AX might have taken into account all the consequences of the available connections and have some reason behind.

In my case I tried all the possible satellite locations to avoid the daisy chain topology even if the wireless connection was good (see attached image), but I wasn't successful and eventually had to resort to a wired satellite connection.