I've read this thread: https://community.netgear.com/t5/Orbi-WiFi-6-AX-and-WiFi-6E-AXE/iPhone-loses-WiFi-connection-with-RB...and having similar, but perhaps different issues - there are 4 of us in our house, all with iPhones. All of us experience similar problems. Our iPhones drop wifi connection. Sometimes it reconnects after a while, sometimes we have to disable and re-enable wifi on the iPhone to reconnect, and sometimes we have to remove the SSID - "forget network" and go through the motions of adding the SSID back. It's super annoying because we happen to live in an area with near zero mobile network coverage so wifi is critical for all of us.
Setup:
1 gb fibre via BT (UK) with ISP provided modem
1 x Orbi RBR850 router
4 x Orbi RBS850 satellites
approx 25-30 devices connected at any given point in time (satellite tv, apple tvs, Sonos, laptops, nest thermostats & co2 monitors, and some other IOT devices)
house is ~7,500 sq ft and an old property, so big, thick walls. All satellites are connected to router via ethernet since the 5ghz backhaul didn't really work in our home (meta point: we used to have Apple Airport Extremes throughout the house connected via same ethernet and worked fine for 6yrs without any issues, albeit slow since we upgraded our ISP to 1gb fibre)
I've been in touch with netgear support for a month now, and still no resolution. What we tried:
manually reinstalled firmware on router after factory reset
reset all satellites
2.4ghz set to ch 11
5ghz set to ch 44
AX disabled
CTS = 2349
MTU = 500
reset network settings on iPhones and re-added orbi SSID
there may have been one or 2 other things we did, but I now forget.
Anyway, over my morning coffee this morning I was browsing the news on my phone, and again network dropped while using my phone, so not in DND mode or phone in Lock Screen mode. So I disable wifi, re-enable and its back. This kept happening and lost connectivity 4 times in 1 hr, in spite of being relatively stationary, in one room, less than 20ft away from the satellite. On one of the 4 occasions it wouldn't reconnect, so I had to go through the whole "forget network" and adding it back in process. Our iPhones are relatively new (oldest is XR, newest is 13 pro, all running iOS 15.5)
This is super annoying, and I'm almost at the point of ditching orbi and going to something else (even back to my old apple airport extremes), but I'm not one for giving up this quickly.
Any tips/advice would be much appreciated - NETGEAR Support have run out of things for me to try, it seems.
perhaps @donawalt or @FURRYe38 have some sage advice from their previous exchange?
