Technology

a networking issue with the netgear orbi rbr50, solved (so far)

whbeebe2 Comments

So far the internal Orbi WiFi and fixed network has stayed up. What’s more significant is that when we are watching a streaming service, such as Disney+, there are no more buffering waits (where a swirling icon appears on screen and the video stops playing). Throughput seems to be much better. I can attribute this more to (I believe) disabling DST than I can to changing my NTP server to an official NIST time service, although any service I can switch away from Netgear, the happier it makes me.

If what I did to solve this is the case then we’re talking about a fairly significant bug in the Orbi firmware supplied by Netgear, which is why I’m so interested in replacing it with an official OpenWRT image rather than the one Netgear wants us to use.

2 thoughts on “a networking issue with the netgear orbi rbr50, solved (so far)”

  1. Thank you for your original post. It was the first one I’d found that clued me into the date when my troubles started – the day DST went into effect. And, the time cycle was similar to what I was seeing – a disconnect every 4 to 6 hours.

    My troubles presented as minor levels of random packet loss several hops down in the path where previously I had absolutely perfect quality for hours and days. I was viewing my path using a visual trace route tool – Pingplotter – runniing a trace every second. Every 4 to 6 hours I could see the packet loss on the router IP (192.168.n.n) start to build and within 3 or 4 minutes it would get up to 75%. By then the Internet was disconnected and would stay disconnected even when the PL went back down below 5%. At this point a reboot of the RBR50 temporarily fixed the connection.

    I came across a Reddit post today that mentioned the DST issue but also that the Traffic Meter was somehow involved.

    Do you or did you have your Traffic Meter enabled?

    I have subsequently disabled DST per the NTP option and assigned my preferred NTP server.

    I also checked my Traffic Meter and it was enabled so I disabled it. My router has since then been solid.

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    • I never turned off the traffic meter. If turning off the traffic meter somehow mitigated the issue, then the traffic meter only triggered the DST bug. Turning off DST fixed it as well. And while I can say that picking a different NTP server also helped, it gave me additional peace of mind.

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