Orbi RBRE960 6GHz radio kills BGW320 gateway

That's bizarre!   It's got to be something with the BGW320.  I have a Netgear RAXE500 with 6E (6GHz) and it doesn't bother my BGW210.

@xkennw Thanks for sharing your experience but you mention that:

 The 2 devices weren't even connected by network cable,

How much physical distance were the two (boxes) devices? There had to EMI interference. Did they happen to be in the same room or closet?

I am not saying the BGW320 preformed well in your situation but there must be a little more to this story.

Dave

It shouldn’t matter.  I’m fairly certain there are strict standards that are in place to prevent this sort of issue and someone is at fault.  

Hi @dave006 thanks for your reply. Initially they were side by side. But then I tested separating them by 33+ feet (but still in the same room - the basement) and had the exact same issue. I also had them on different electrical circuits, each outlet with EMI noise filtering. I realize it's still all the same house electric, but nothing I did seemed to make a difference - except following what someone else reported and disabling the Orbi's 6GHz radio. I did not try putting the router in, say, the attic with the modem in the basement -- I suppose that would be one test I could try, but what's weirder is this issue also affected my neighbors service as well (making their gateways blink white), so I'm pretty careful now not to turn that 6GHz radio back on until I see some release notes mentioning a fix. It's a weird one.

Wait, the neighbor?  Are they also on the BGW320?   Holy smokes!

Yeah about a half dozen of my neighbors were down until we figured this out this past weekend. This was an 18 day duration. Not surprisingly one ended up quitting and going to Comcast. 😩

Thanks for the followup post but the attic is a bit extreme as the next step.

A quick follow-up question. Did you happen to ever get a chance to test with the Wi-Fi radios disabled on the BGW320?

Dave

Hmmm.....if your Orbi was knocking down signals from multiple neighbors I'm surprised that you didn't get a visit from FCC guys in suits and black Escalades.

@dave006 - actually that is how I've been running it, with the gateways radios disabled. And yes, sure enough even when I had the radios disabled on that device, Orbi was still knocking it out. 

@tonydi - I obviously don't know what is technically possible here, but a.) I know my 6GHz signal does not carry very far.  Even inside the home its signal is weaker than the other radios due to attenuation. This is also one reason I didn't mind disabling that radio, it wasn't worth the increased download/upload speeds. b.) The gateway would work initially, albeit briefly, out of box. It came up, I could connect to it, then it performed an update, restarted, came up again, and performed a second update. After that second update, the modem would just continue to restart while my 6Ghz radio was on.  I don't know if that points to a bad firmware or something else, but seems strange that it would come up the first time, and work okay.

Whatever was going on, I think the 6GHz signal was frankly telling my gateway to keep restarting, and however possible, that "condition" was sent back up the stream to my neighbors.  I know how screwy this sounds, believe me, I've been in IT for 25 years; of course, I've not spent much time on fiber networks...

@gr8sho 

It shouldn’t matter.  I’m fairly certain there are strict standards that are in place to prevent this sort of issue and someone is at fault.  

Especially since both devices passed FCC radio interference/emission testing. @xkennw had multiple BGW320s but we still don't know if it is an issue with that specific to the Netgear model or the BGW320.

The Netgear thread mentioned the Netgear Orbi RBRE960B. There are 2 distinct BGW320 OEM provider: Humax for the -500 and Nokia -505.

@xkennw could help if they recall if any of the BGW320s were different versions.

Dave