“I have cat5e wired throughout the house. Does it make sense to hardwire both the main unit and the satellite, or will that create two separate main units with two different networks?”
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Yes. You can hard wire the Orbi satellites. It supports both wireless and wired for the backaul. You can also daisy chain the satellites or wire each satellite back to the Orbi router.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.It makes sense to hardwire both, but it takes some work. I just spent the last 3 hours setting up the Orbi in my Cat5e wired condo. My problem is not distance, but rather interference due to the steal frame of my high rise building, so I need to connect by the Ethernet. The key to doing it is to manually change the firmware to V2.1.1.16. Do not rely on the app to tell you your firmware is up to date. (I made this mistake and it cost me much aggravation) You must go to the Netgear support website and download V2.1.1.16 for both the router and the satellite. You must upgrade the satellite first, then the router. To do this you should set up the satellite with a wireless connection. Once V2.1.1.16 is installed in both the satellite and the router, you can upplug the satellite and move it to the room where your end Cat5e connection is, connect the satillite to the ethernet cable, and then power up the satellite. If you do this it works great with a seamless single network.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.I have some of my orbi satellites connected via ethernet. Here's the netgear support article than explains several ways this can be done: https://kb.netgear.com/000051205/What-is-Ethernet-backhaul-and-how-do-I-set-it-up-on-my-Orbi-WiFi-System
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.According to Best Buy and Netgear you can hardwire, but once we did it was nothing but chaos. Things would randomly stop working, our nestdoor bell stopped, lap tops, cell phones. Depending where we were in the house nothing would connect. We would get security warnings on any webpage we tried to connect saying the page was not secure and we couldnt access it. I called netgear and was told we could not directly hardwire an orbi satellite into the orbi router. We were told we could hardwire one satellite into another though. So we did that, and next day, exact same problems, things would constantly drop and we would get security warnings. We had Geek Squad out today for a unrelated issue, and I asked if we could hardwire the satellite into the Orbi, showed him the diagram that's on the Netgear help page that says how to do it, showed him the Best Buy page that said you could do it, and he just shook his head an said you absolutely can't do it. So....
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.I used to use an ethernet over coax setup in my house to directly connect my router to my wireless access point. When I replaced those items with the Orbi I tried doing the same setup with the router and the satellite and it didn't work at all, so I don't think they can be hard-wired together.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.Well. It won't create two separate "main" units, but it also won't work like you'd expect. The backhaul network was designed to operate wirelessly and gets good penetration. Apparently, wiring the satellite to a main unit via ethernet is under consideration by Netgear but it is not implemented/ updated as of yet.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.You only need on internet connection and the second orbi will hook up to the first one.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.This does not work like that. The main unit is the router and the satellite is only an access point. So if you hard wired the Satellite from the main unit the Satellite would still use wireless to talk to the main unit. What this does have is the ability to hard wire into the Satellite which is nice a lot of access point don't have that.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.No the system doesn’t work like that. Satellite will only connect to the main router.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.there is no option to hardwire the Satellite.
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