I purchased an Orbi 960 Mesh WiFi system, consisting of a router and two satellites, when it first came out last year. Overall, I've been pleased with the product. However, there has been one minor annoyance that NetGear has been unwilling or unable to solve since I brought the issue up last spring.
My house is wired with ethernet cable, so I was pleased that this product promised that it would function with everything hardwired together. One of the satellites would be pretty far away with a lot of building material between it and the router, so a wired backhaul channel would be significantly better than a wireless one. The ethernet cable hub is in the garage and the router is located in the home office. Therefore, I purchased a 5g switch and connected the router and satellites together through their 2.5G ports via the switch.
The system recognized that it was all wired together and utilized that for backhaul. However, the problem was that while one satellite's wireless backhaul channel was turned off, the other remained on - always. This amounts to wasted bandwidth, I believe, with one satellite simultaneously utilizing both wired and wireless backhaul channels. Resyncing, resetting, disconnecting and reconnecting, switching satellite positions all failed to solve the problem.
The India based tech support has been very frustrating to deal with. Though they admitted that my problem should not be occurring, and that a wired satellite should shut down its wireless backhaul channel, they were unable to find a solution. They had me resync, reset, disconnect, reconnect, switch positions, hardwire directly to the router over and over again without solving the problem. It got to the point where it felt like they were going to ask me to repeat all of the above while standing on my head to see if that made a difference. Another very ridiculous property of this customer support system is that if you do not respond to an open ticket during a seven day period, it auto-closes. As someone who travels away from home on business quite often, this happened multiple times, forcing me creating a new ticket a total of four times for the same problem.
Ultimately, they guessed that one of my satellites was faulty, but I was not convinced that was the case as I am pretty sure that I could get the problem to migrate from one satellite to the other during all of the troubleshooting. Anyway, they sent me a replacement satellite and as it turns out that made things even worse as it would not sync with the router at all, wired or wirelessly. I believe that instead of being sent a new satellite, I was given a defective one returned by some other customer - basically they offloaded their junk on to me.
And that is where I sit today, no closer to a solution than I was this spring. Again, I am not convinced the problem is a faulty satellite, but there is no way of confirming that since NetGear will not send me a replacement satellite that works. The problem could be with the router or even the firmware. At this point, I am about to give up as I have been dealing with this for six months, it is a minor issue, and I'm getting tired of it. I'll just return the crap replacement satellite and live with it.
I do have two recommendations however, one of which would solve my dilemma, in the hopes that someone with actual influence at NetGear reads this.
1. Send out a firmware update that allows the customer to go into the router settings and turn off a wireless backhaul channel when the satellite is hardwired to the router. This is currently not possible, but if the ability to turn off a stubborn, redundant wireless backhaul channel in lieu of the perfectly fine wired one existed, that would be all I needed.
2. Do not auto-close support tickets if there is no activity for seven days without first warning the customer. This is common sense and should not even be an issue.
Finally, I hope to hear back from anyone who has had similar experiences and read about what they may have done to solve this problem.
I've speedtested the satellite with the wired backhaul because I have my home wired for 2.5gig service. And it will max out the wired backhaul without issues. I tested both wired/wireless backhaul and it didn't impact performacne. So even through it shows the 5ghz backhaul connected, it isn't impacting how it performs.
It annoys me that it displays it like that but since it isn't impacting my system, I've not worried about it.
Wireless backhaul has always been enabled on Orbi systems. Been like that since the beginning. I believe on reason is that if something happens on the wired line, the RBS can automatically fall back to a wireless sync connection.
If you have all RBS connected via ethernet, they should ALL show as wired status on the RBRs web page. If one doesn't, then I would first check the one RBS near the RBR first wirelessly sycing it to the RBR. Turn OFF the other RBS. Check the status and once the RBS front LED is BLUE, connect the RBS to the RBR using a good quality patch cable. Give a couple of minutes and check the RBRs status. Should change to wired. IF it does, then you might take a look at the cabling at the remote location for this RBS.
Swap RBS locations with each other to see if the problem follows or not.
What is the size of your home? Sq Ft? What is the distance between the router and 📡 satellite(s)?
What is the brand and model of the LAN switch you installed?
