I ran a speed test on our old xfinity setup to our wired iMacs, new machines, using cat 7 cable, and got 925 download speed. I swapped out the xfinity for a new orbi 850 and wifi speeds were faster, fantastic! But on the wired iMacs, same cabling, nothing different, I am getting download speeds of 320 at the fastest. Support chat and phone calls had me upgrade firmware and tweak a variety of settings with no change. Great wifi speeds, wired ethernet on the same cabling as before and it's 1/3 the speed. Our problem has been escalated to Level 2, which means somebody is going to call me back probably tomorrow with fresh ideas, but I'm wondering if somebody here has had this happen. Nothing new as far a cabling, but a very slow wired ethernet speed when compared to wifi and when compared to old router.
Please describe how the Level 2 support works out. Almost everyone on the forum saw our 90 days of 'complimentary support' expire long ago (In my case, nearly five years ago), so we have no recent experience with Netgear support. This being the weekend, one wonders how many Level 2 engineers are available.
While waiting, There is probably no harm in running a few tests of your own, such as:
What does the Speed Test on the Orbi router itself report?
It sounds like there are multiple iMac computers on the network, It would be interesting to determine what iperf3 reports when two iMacs are connected to the router LAN ports. (iperf3 is a program which is designed to test the maximum capacity of a link, available from: https://iperf.fr/iperf-download.php ) When I test with two computers connected to my Orbi router, it consistently reports 900+MB/s, which is about the maximum possible on a gigabit Ethernet link. (Even Ethernet has some overhead.)
The cable modem is a Netgear Nighthawk CM2000 which is definitely doing its job because our wifi speed is 1400+ next to the router and quite fast everywhere else. Wired ethernet to a pair of new iMacs has never made it past 325. We've been using the wifi for the iMacs until the fix, and that gets them in the 700 range for download speeds.
The firmware version is the absolutely latest one which is of course not always the best, but it is indeed the latest because tech support had me install it two different ways. It is this: RBR850-V4.6.9.11_2.3.5-signed.chk Tech support btw was two different people on chat and one person on the phone and they were all intelligent, patient, good at their work.
Yes everything has been powered off and on several times, the paperclip restart from factory default tried, all sorts of tweaking in the admin done as led by tech support. All this must happen before being bumped up to level 2 support who have not yet called me back but this being a weekend, I am not impatient for that or put out by it in any way and understand these things take time.
In the meantime I have found the solution on my own! First step is to carefully remove all attached cabling, next put it back in the box and return it to Amazon from whence it came, and finally replace it with an Asus Zen AXE11000 as god intended. Whichever god you like.
