"This is a disaster," I thought, watching the link speed on the TP-Link Deco X90 Wi-Fi units go from more than 1000 megabits per second to just 6, see-sawing between high to low numbers and with huge packet loss.
Well, OK, in the grand scheme of things it wasmore of a first-world problem but it made work and schooling from home impossible, breaking everything from video calls to Google Classroom.
While TP-Link's techies were good and remotely tried to figure out what was causing the problem, nothing obvious popped up. The Decos are going back for investigation, which is a shame as they started out so well.
Now, as a modern spousal unit tasked with sorting out home tech, I needed to organise new Wi-Fi or be smothered with a pillow in the night because the whānau have no internet.
A Netgear Orbi RBK850 router and satellite was the replacement wireless. I ordered a second satellite for better ground floor coverage as well.
They're not the latest RBK960 that Netgear sends ad-emails for. The Orbi RBK960 uses the 6 gigaHertz band for really fast connection between devices, and would've been a better match for my Orcon 8/8 Gbps Hyperfibre connection.
Who knows when I'll get to try out the next-gen Wi-Fi tech. Our Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment is, unfortunately, going very slow on approving said Wi-Fi 6E gear which is now common overseas and has until then banned it from use in New Zealand.
Back to the Orbi RBK850s and long story short, once they were set up, they worked really well. With wireless backhaul, the system consistently shows over 800 Mbps throughput. If had been clever enough to test properly, no third satellite was actually required as the Orbis provide very good coverage.
A Netgear Orbi RBK850 WiFi access point in its happy all-is-working blue ring state. Photo / Supplied
The short free trials for parental controls and anti-cyber threat subscriptions are as annoying as you'd expect for a mesh Wi-Fi system costing a shade under $1600. It's unacceptable that Netgear and other vendors do this.
Setting up the system looked so very easy, but it turned into several hours of following the smartphone app instructions, getting the dreaded magenta no-sync with router ring on the satellites, instead of the all's good blue ring which indicates that everything's working.
The ring that changes colour from white to blue to red is the only status indicator on the Orbis, if you don't count the power/reset LED at the back. With the lack of detailed error messages in the smartphone app, you end up scratching your head when some unknown factor frustrates your Wi-Fi set up.
Vendors are in a bind here with consumer networking gear.
On the one hand, the tech is complex. Mesh Wi-Fi involves syncing two or more high-frequency radios for a stable and reliable data connection between the access points.
At the same time, that tech has to be easily installable by customers. For that reason, there are countless engineers around the world working on robust set-up routines that cover most cases non-techie users will subject the gear to.
In my case, although I patiently (OK, I swore quite a bit) went through the suggested setup in the smartphone app, I had a Wi-Fi not-work despite goodness knows how many resets.
Being a mere online opinion columnist, I resorted to searching for the symptoms online and found that other Orbi users had indeed torn out their hair over the same problem.
Bliss though: some of them had figured out that the easiest way to get around it was to go wired.
Get the router up and running first (which took a few resets) and then connect the satellites to it with the bundled Ethernet cable. Reset, be mesmerised by the multicolour ring, wait for it to turn blue and switch off, and the synchronisation is done.
Unplug the Ethernet cable, place the satellites where you want them, and the house is sparkling with high-speed Wi-Fi.
Follow this by kicking yourself for going down the prescribed set-up route instead of saving hours of aggravation searching the internet first, and wishing Netgear's software would throw up geeky hexadecimal error messages that pinpoint where exactly the problem lies.
