The Orbi does what it is supposed to do — mesh other parts of your house until you can get an Ethernet cable to that area. Since my wife is also working from home now, she wanted the front room for her office. The problem is that our network is in the backroom, several walls away. Getting nomenclature out of the way, I’m calling these APs and not routers because I disabled the routing functions. One doesn’t need two routers in a network.
Using my iPhone 11, in the same room with the AP, I get 768 Mbps (max 853) on my 1 Gbps wired network. Both the AP and the WLANPi are plugged into the same switch. Not bad. With the WLANPi plugged into the Orbi, I get 764 Mbps (max 806). The built-in Speedtest function showed 940 Mbps.
In her office with the satellite, I connected with iPerf at 654 Mbps (737 max). That surprised me. Even with my laptop plugged into the Orbi satellite, I got 500 Mbps. Plenty fast enough to configure Cisco APs.So it seems the tri-radio system is working as expected. The backhaul radio is on channel 157. It isn’t the cleanest channel but it seems fine. BSS Coloring is in play so that helps on the 11ax devices, maybe.
One thing that seems odd is that the beacon interval for the satellite is 140.4 ms. I don’t see a way to disable .11b. I have another AP for that mess.
All in all, this isn’t bad. I don’t game so I cannot speak to that. But for my workload and the random UDP distractions here and there, this will work. Remember, I’ve only had the system up for a couple of hours.
