Orbi RBR50 and Slow WiFi Problems with iOS Devices

I’ve been experience a very strange problem with slow WiFi speeds on my iOS devices for a few months now and was wondering if anyone might be able to point me to something to try to fix it.

It seems that the problem started when I updated our iPhones and iPads to iOS 11 and has been ongoing ever since.  I have spoken with Apple about the issue, but nothing we’ve tried has helped.  Things like turning Airplane mode on and off, resetting network settings, re-setting up the iPad/iPhone as a new device, etc.

Here’s what happens.  When home, the iOS devices act normally and have a good connection to the Orbi system and get full Internet speed (150 Mbps for my service) all over the house.  If we then take the iOS devices out of the house and connect to another WiFi network, such as at work, all is still well.  The problem starts when we return home.  They connect to the WiFi network just fine, but if I perform a speed test, they will show anywhere from about 1 Mbps to about 25 Mbps connections and will not get any better throughput.  Also, while this is happening, if you try to use an application that accesses the Internet, it will experience long delays in accessing the information every few minutes.  Once the delay is over, everything works as expected, but at the low, and sometimes very low, connection speeds.  No amount of fiddling with the iOS devices will correct the situation; however, through the process of elimination I found that restarting the Orbi router gets everything back to working as expected.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what could potentially be causing this odd behavior, but would appreciate any insight that someone may have and would be willing to share.  This is becoming more and more annoying as time goes on.