Orbi and AAEBS

So today, I bought an orbi rbk50 (coverage area for 350m2) to use in a relative’s house. Now this has a few AAEBS with express and extremes of varying generations (mostly gen 4 and 5 extremes and the last released express units). All in all there are a total of 7 units of which the 5th gen extreme is the base router from the cable model and then the rest are in wireless extender modes. The quality of of FaceTime is quite poor in some of the more frequented parts and the hope is to increase the internet range on these orbi units using the existing AAEBS. I had them draw a floor plan of the house and then I have added a rough approx. of where the dead zones and relative strength of the wifi signals are. These guys have been pretty happy with the Apple devices because they are robust and have gone through power surges and brownouts without any failure, plus they don’t have to fix it if they were to reboot. There is cat5 in the house, but is spread from the office to the top 4 rooms. I know this seems complicated, but I really want to help them and surprise them with this fix. I only selected the orbi because of the recommendations of smallnetbuilder, so please help me out. They don’t need blazing internet just enough to be able to run FaceTime/video chat/ oversee arlo cam feeds and the occasional YouTube.

PS you may need to simplify the solution, as I am quite a novice on networking and the solution currently present in this house is the best what I could do given the equipment, my knowledge and their capabilities.

Help will be appreciated.




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Any advice please


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Still waiting for some help?


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Don't mean to offend you but could you please re-post the diagram with some less cryptic handwriting?
I wasn't able to figure out what's what apart from a couple of words.

 

I hope this will be clearer. I apologise my writing is quite poor, but writing shorthand on hundreds of notes the scrawl gets a bit “poor”. The Apple Pencil doesn’t help either.


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First try adding additional Orbi satellites near the dead spots otherwise you might wanna try powerline adapters, your internet/lan signals would go through your power lines assuming they don't terminate in weird or separate ways that should allow you to put powerline extenders positioned intermittently for proper coverage.

You can get a straight up power line to ethernet adapter if you want to connect existing WiFi routers/AP or go for the combo Powerline WiFi units.

Combo
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias=electronics&field-keywords=netgear+powerline+wifi&rh=n:172282,k:netgear+powerline+wifi

Ethernet
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias=electronics&field-keywords=netgear+powerline&rh=n:172282,k:netgear+powerline

Also note that jumping from one satellite to the next starting from the main unit, bandwidth halves each time, with WiFi extenders so Powerline might help if you need to many extenders from point of main unit.

Absolute best way though is more expensive and that would mean a router located a certain point and from there whole home ethernet running to various rooms with AP (Access Points) connected to the etherne runs. New home builds at least the expensive ones some of them have a central point like in a basement with a switch/router connected to ethernet cables coming in from multiple rooms, with APs in the rooms connected at the other end.

 

Thank you very much for the elaborate response Aivxtla. The thing is the house does indeed have an ISP supplied modem, connecting to the 1st floor master bedroom’s AirPort Extreme. The house does have cat5 ?e cabling preinstalled but only runs in the rooms on the top floor. The Orbi’s haven’t been installed yet, I am going to be flying in with them in a month. I was wondering whether they are a better system to expand the range and “speed” of the internet in house such as this utilising the existing Apple airport devices. The other choice is the linksys Veleop mesh system. You are also correct the current wifi system exists as a wifi extenders, but this is reasonably working if they know where the signal is the strongest to be able to FaceTime with their kids. Another reason to select the AAEB stations were they are quit the robust units, in this country where this house is located suffers from brownouts and blackouts yet they soldier on, and need no maintainence unlike the asus, Belkin units

 

The hardware in the AirPort Extreme is pretty much the same as in the Netgear R7000 and Asus AC68U (same WiFi chip and CPU by Broadcom) however with internal antennas on the Apple unit vs external antennas on the other two, the Apple unit would have much worse range/performance than these two despite costing the same. As for mesh Orbi probably better than Velop from most benchmarks I’ve seen.

I haven’t owned the Orbis, but Netgear is sending me a pair for an unrelated test soon as I am a recurrent tester for them.

 

Can you tell me how I can best integrate these systems to increase range in the house, the most this house needs, is a reliable wifi system that can FaceTime from the farthest points (as depicted) and can allow for the netgear arlo cameras to work. My biggest (and continuing) fear is that netgear orbi’s FW is being pushed automatically, which then has the ability to lockup the network, and to top it off the reviews for the FW is that it’s unstable at best... the airports (which Apple has confirmed today is dead) at least are rock stable, come what may. So yes, I need both range and reliability (meaning no input required in the upkeep of the wifi system)


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The base stations are 5th gen and express units are 2nd gen , and a total of 7 units spread throughout the house, being “fed” by the 5th gen extreme in the master bedroom, connected via Ethernet to the modem on the ground floor office, and all the rest are connected to it wirelessly. I too have never owned any mesh/orbi systems before. Only Apple units since the N routers were all the rage, simply because all the settings and the constant upkeep was driving me loco. The Apple routers I have are all 2nd hand so they were cheap and work reliably, same goes for the house in question.


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Yeah those are sensible decisions practical and cost efficient. Now as for improving range Orbi might be a good upgrade solution from your Extremes if you want one ecosystem, rather than a hodge podge of different brands and settings of routers as you explained in your post.

 

What’s your ISP provided speed?

Orbi backhaul is 5Ghz 4x4 (4 Stream Transmit/receive dual function, ie 4 antennas), backaul meaning Orbi unit to Orbi unit transmission so it will have a max throughput unit to unit at about 950-960 Mbps (1733 Mbps is only theoretical not real world) and ethernet limit is 950-960 Mbps . However client side it’s 2x2 (2 antennas) so with a max theoretical 866Mbps Link rate, taking into account overhead, distance and real world efficiency you can expect peak rate of ~500-700 Mbps to your phones/laptops etc. If you have ISP speeds slower than 500 you should be ok. At the edge of the device range for any router/AP expect speeds like 1 Mbps or below.

If you have Gigabit internet only way to get full speeds everywhere is either 3 or 4 antenna/stream Access Point/Router connected to Ethernet like a Ubiquiti UniFi HD AP. You could try 3 APs in the 3 rooms you have Ethernet or even buy 3 refurb R7800 routers which are much cheaper than the Unifis and set them in AP mode. The R7800 quad antenna (AC2600) is currently the best 5Ghz performance/range router. Or you could even buy 3 refurb old Netgear R7000 or AC68U triple antenna routers (AC1900) and put those in AP mode. The connect the other end of the 3 ethernet runs to a router you already own.

However seeing you are using old routers some of which have very low bandwidth I assume you don’t have Gigabit internet.


Here’s a nice deep mesh comparison:
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wir...22-mesh-mashup-redux-netgear-s-orbi-checks-in

FYI in that link when they say 1 hop, means from main unit to first AP in a line let’s say, and 2 hops would be the second AP further from the first. If you have APs on either side let’s say, then it’s 1 hop despite whichever side you measure from.

 

Gosh this is getting a bit technical for me. I have been using the
smallnetbuilder website for some years, however their technical jargon on testing goes over my head. It’s because of them did I select the Orbi.

Thank you for reinforcing my purchase decision. I was a bit worried whether I should have gone with the Linksys mesh. Thing is my reason for setting the system up the way it is, was to have the same SSID, passwords so that one user could simply walk from the master bedroom to the lounge without any interruptions. However in reality It hasn’t happened that way, and I believe the mobile devices try to stay with their initial wifi stations and so the wifi call drops. This latter issue was the reason to invest in some orbi/velop system.

You are quite right, this is a bog standard internet on a non gigabit internet, like I said it connects to the “main” AirPort Extreme 5th gen in the master bedroom, and then the “cascade” of wifi extenders take over spreading the wifi signal. The main need of this system is to get wifi that can support FaceTime video and browsing, I am sure these late 60’s people are not PUG/fortnite/ COD/ GTA5 online players


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can you elaborate on how to best use the Orbi with the exisitng Extremes+Express to create one seamless network

 

Any advice?


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