I have an RBR850 with satellite and since I got it about a hear ago, it has been working great. When I set it up and did wireless and wired speed tests, they were screaming fast and blew my socks off (WiFi 6 with a compatible laptop was real nice). Recently, I noticed that on mobile devices that some gifs and images wouldn't load, and when I did a speed test over WiFi, I was now getting 20mbs up and 3mps down. Wired seems to be absolutely fine, and when I do a speed test on the router, I get the usual 600Mbs I get from my ISP. So, the issue isn't with my wired setup or my ISP. I haven't changed anything in regards to the router (location, configuration) yet this started just happening on its own. The only thing that changes is the router updating its firmware automatically, so that is my current number one suspect, but I'm running the latest firmware and I'm unsure if I can even downgrade this thing or find the firmware that worked in the past.
I tried rebooting it and doing a speed test and I got 415.56Mbs right away via WiFi using
Speedtest.net (I get 361.46 when I'm wired via ethernet?!), but then a few minutes later, I tried again and got 76Mbs, so I know the radio is still capable of reaching some pretty fast speeds, but something is slowing it down after some time. I thought it might be some device that's hogging the pipe, but it's unlikely that I'd have one device that would use most of a 650Mbs pipe, and unfortunately, this $500 router doesn't have any QoS options or individual device traffic monitoring, so I just tried disabling everything except my laptop, and that didn't appear to make a difference (except crash my router forcing me to power cycle it to get it back up and running).
Actually, now the router won't respond at all after I tried disabling some connected devices and enabled the traffic meter so I could see if something was really hogging the pipe. So even after powercycling it a few times, it wouldn't respond at all (couldn't access it through the moble app or though the web admin), so I did a hard reset with a pin and got it back up just like it was out of the box. I set it up again (completely basic settings, nothing custom) and did a speed test and now I'm getting 70Mbs, so it looks like even resetting the router didn't fix my issue, so I'm heavily leaning towards hardware failure or bad firmware (but I don't think many others are experiencing the same issue in having our of the box).
I read some articles and tried messing around with the wireless settings as I was originally using auto channels and didn't change any settings beyond the basic setup (WiFi name/password). I tried using a wifi analyzer and setting it to specific unused channels, rebooting and trying a speed test, but the best I could get on my laptop was just over 100Mbs, and 20Mbs on my phone (which is using 5Ghz). Still pretty pathetic, but slightly better than when I started out.
I've owned a Nighthawk before this that started acting flaky, so I purchased this Orbi thinking it would solve all my wireless issues, but I guess right after my warranty ended, I guess it was done its job and could die.
After my experience with my nighthawk dying, then this ORBI dying just after a year, I'm thinking that Netgear just makes low quality junk and I should probably look for a better quality whole home wireless solution for the same price, unless someone knows a fix for this issue?
What Firmware version is currently loaded?
V4.6.3.16_2.0.51
What wireless device are you using?
Brand new G7 Dell laptop.
What are your wired speed results with a wired PC or laptop?
361.46Mbs
What is the size of your home? Sq Ft?
Medium bungalow, about 800 Sq ft.
What is the distance between the router and satellite(s)?
25 feet in a detached garage.
