Yes – it’s slightly above one thousand. European decimals… 
Ah yes, my Swiss colleagues often catch me out with those too. You’d have thought I’d have got use to them by now.
I use an Orbi mesh system with two satellites and get a minimum of 200mbps in any corner of the house and yard and something over 500mbps if I’m in the same room with one of the devices.
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Dave that pretty much is exactly what I see.
I have 220Mb Virgin fibre in the UK, and anywhere in the house or garden I can max out the link with ease.
Internally when transferring files around to the Synology NAS’s they can get up around 700Mb over the backhaul, so it’s pretty impressive work from Orbi.
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All very impressive… the joys of rural Florida living…lol
It looks like I can get 1gbps service here from xfinity, looking into it!
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Well what are you waiting for?
Just look at getting a good Mesh set-up that will bathe your large home (and garden) with all that WiFi goodness.
Got to make use of all that great weather.
Though it’s a long run back to the music room to turn the record over 
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This group’s feedback on this topic has been excellent and is very much appreciated. Thanks to all of you who offered valuable insight, especially those with a more technical bend. I’m a technologist by trade and that is exactly what the doctor ordered.
I sprang for the Orbi AX6000 system almost two weeks ago. Had to keep the pre-existing cable router (it’s mandated by my service provider) which the Orbi is now plugged into for Internet access. The only other device still plugged into the cable modem is my work laptop. Am more than happy to have it off my home network for security reasons. All of my wired devices are now connected to the Orbi, plus several WiFi devices. Wireless on the cable modem has been disabled.
Unsurprisingly, connections to WiFi have improved dramatically. Given how poor WiFi was before, the bar wasn’t very high. Am not going to rewrite Netgear’s marketing copy here. Let it suffice to say the Orbi has more than met the expectations Netgear set.
So let’s get into what kicked off this change. Mostly it was for my audio system. The audio rack’s location can’t be changed. Which makes running a wired connection somewhat problematic as the drop would have be down a wall 15’ away. Not the end of the world, just more fixtures with wires coming out of walls and being running around the edge of the room. My cell phone is my only phone and cell service here is spotty, so there was impetus for better WiFi for that as well. A tablet can be used to control the stereo via Roon and sometimes the connection was lacking. A reworking my wireless system certainly had it’s attractions.
My relatively high end audio system (Atma-Sphere pre/amps, Devore O/96, Moon streamer, Benchmark DAC) relied on WiFi for streaming music files from a QNAP NAS. Only Redbook CDs could be played, and though rare, there were occasional dropouts. Upsampling was a no-go, and something I wanted to try. Adding a streaming service was of interest, but delayed as higher bit-rate music, the primary interest, couldn’t be played. OK, OK, I hear you,“Enough with the background. Did it work?” I’m getting there.
Enter the Orbi. After getting it setup, I tested a couple of devices with wired connections to the satellite, but both devices lacked gigabit network cards, so maxed out. On my desktop, which is hardwired, I get 850 Mbps. Hardwired to the satellite one of the laptops I tested saw seeing a solid 500 Mbps (which is 62.5 megabytes a second). With the old WiFi my tablet saw 40Mbps (5 megabytes) and that was spotty. Now it sees 140Mbps (17.5 megabytes). Neither is really a completely valid test, but obviously there’s a vast improvement. Maybe someday I’ll relocate my desktop machine or get access to a laptop with a gigabit network card to truly test the wired performance off the Orbi satellite. For now, it’s doing what I want. So let’s get into that, shall we?
First audio test was could I upsample using Roon’s DSP. The answer is a resounding “Yes!”. Upsampling to 192kHz with Headroom adjustment set to 0 there is no clipping. Currently that is the biggest brick I can throw at the Orbi and it absorbs the blow with nary a rattle. I’ve also noticed an improvement in the overall sound quality at Redbook bit-rate compared to before. Just more air and clarity. I suspect that is because the previous router was using 2.4Ghz which is a saturated band which means more packet collisions and resends (and likely the cause of dropouts previously). Now the music is being transported on two 5Ghz bands which is cleaner and less cluttered. I’ll put my REW software to get some samples for comparison. My guess is there won’t be a difference and it’s just my brain trying to justify an expenditure. 
After trying a few different bit-rates I’ve settled on 2x the default for now, but will continue to experiment. It is also interesting to note that the Orbi management sees the streamer as a wired network device, just like my desktop and NAS.
One other thing. As already mentioned, I’m running Roon on my NAS (J3455 quad-core 1.5GHz CPU; 8GB RAM; 4-3TB HDs in RAID 10 configuration; 2-250GB SSDs in smart cache mode). Files are stored in AIFF format. When streaming at 192kHz the NAS’s CPU usage is low. The Roon process stays below 5% and total system processes occasionally spikes into the 30-40% range. The overall CPU usage hovers around 10% while streaming. Memory usage is a steady 2GB. Network bandwidth use is a consistent 1.6 Mbps.
With Sample Rate Conversion and Headroom Management turned off CPU usage by Roon drops to <1%. Bandwidth usage drops to 225Kbs. The other measurements are static.
So the NAS is managing the processing requirements quite well with overhead to spare. I suspect using an uncompressed format helps, even if only a little.
Knowing most NASes aren’t optimal for Roon, I am pleasantly surprised at this result.
Oh, and my cell phone and wireless devices are much happier, too! 
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This is just not accurate. Roon runs throughout my house using my 5ghz band and it runs great. If your wifi can’t transfer audio across your network then it has serious fundamental problems.
Hi Larry,
I used Sonic for quite a few years back when DSL was a fairly new technology. Sonic did a lot of things other providers wouldn’t. Like provide multiple static IP addresses. Sonic even got into a battle with Pacific Bell in order to keep providing them to their users. When they set up my DSL the tech did some switching office magic to really improve my speed. My recollection was it had something to do with the connection at the switching office. All he really had to do was install it, but he spent a little more time to make the service work as best as possible.
Pac Bell was the upstream provider. Essentially, they owned the DSL service and everyone else was a reseller. Folks I knew had service directly with Pac Bell and they were never happy. Most of these were people I played online games with, like combat flight simulators. When they saw the speed and low latency of my connection that became their favorite excuse for getting shot down.
Loved doing business with Sonic. Glad to hear they’re still around. Thanks for the stroll down memory lane.
Frank that’s great news. It can be difficult to make these recommendations as you cannot guarantee they will work in all situations.
There are lots of things businesses don’t recommend. And governments. And others. Oh, I hear when they say “you can’t do that”, but have never had a problem experimenting to see if they’re right or just hedging their bets. Often it’s the latter.
As a technologist, I understand why Roon wants to keep things as bulletproof as possible, why they take a conservative approach in their hardware and network recommendations. Doing so keeps their users happy and their own headaches minimized. I could have built a NUC from the beginning. I could have punched holes in the wall and run CAT6. Instead, I made a modest investment in the NAS I already owned and upgraded my home network. Both bits of infrastructure serve multiple purposes in my house, so it was never going to be money wasted.
For now, ALL of my needs are being met and my investment in Roon continues to have been a wise one. Should those needs change for some reason, so shall my solutions evolve.
It can be difficult to make these recommendations as you cannot guarantee they will work in all situations.
You are absolutely correct, Michael. Please do note that I am not making recommendations. That’s Roon’s bailiwick. I’m just sharing my experience in case anyone else is in a similar situation and why I tried to provide as much detail as possible. Like my NAS not being stock, my files uncompressed, etc.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Sorry Frank, you misunderstood or I badly communicated…
My short reply was to Brandon, not yourself.
Just myself but I thought the tone of their post was off.
I am all for experiments , how do we learn sometimes if not?
Fixed the order now I hope!
Whilst it is great that you are not having issues using WiFi, many here do and it is not Roon recommended so…
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I did misunderstand!
I assumed your reply was to the group in general as it wasn’t earmarked as being for anyone specifically. Thank you for the explanation.
And you are right about experimentation.
And yes, I see that the order has been resolved.
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Frank sorry you misunderstood me, there was no criticism intended at all.
As one of those that recommended the Orbi solution (though maybe a bit late by the sound of your post), I meant that it doesn’t always perform for everyone in the same way, but I was very happy that you’re experience was exactly the same as mine.
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No, I didn’t misunderstand you and certainly didn’t take it as criticism. I just hope you didn’t take my post wrong.
BTW, you were not too late. This thread will be around and read for quite sometime to come. It has a lot of very good information in it because people like you were willing to take the time and share their experiences.
Thanks again.
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I’m sorry but it’s just silly to keep propagating this idea that Roon doesn’t work with WIFI. Roon doesn’t “recommend it” likely because they don’t want to tech everyone’s crappy routers etc. and it’s easy to just say “use ethernet”. But it’s outdated advice at best. Sure all things being equal why not plug the cable, but no reason to jump through hoops, move gear, drill holes etc.
But if you can run multiple 4k streams and cloud game etc. on wifi, why can’t you play a song over wifi. It makes zero sense.
If Roon isn’t working on WIFI, likely there are many other issues present that just haven’t come to the surface and it’s a good opportunity to fix the WIFI.
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As I said ii am seriously happy it works out well for you and for Frank and whoever else it might work for too.
But to make such a blanket statement like that is a little shortsighted IMHO.
But I am not going to debate it or derail this thread.
Have a blessed day!
But see it works both ways. The post I was responding to said “I do not recommend using WiFi for Roon, at all. When you have walls, or need the signal to go through another floor, it’ll be bad.” Huh?
People make blanket statements all the time that it doesn’t work and is not recommended. To me, that is what is shortsighted. I’m saying it absolutely can and does work, as it should. I’m literally doing it. I’m not a magician. And I stand by my statement that if you can’t pass audio over your network then it has serious problems. How could one possibly explain not being able to play a song over a 5gHz network?
I’m not trying to be a jerk or argue with you, but it’s important to sometimes challenge the “conventional wisdom” that gets thrown about. If someone says “you will have problems”, I’m going to challenge/qualify that each and every time.
But for it to work you’ve got to be the kind of person that generally maintains and pays attention to their network infrastructure. If you don’t, then yeah…ethernet.