If I get in the mood for some tech hacking, I am considering putting #OpenWRT on my old unused #Netgear #Orbi units.
When we moved into this house, the cable company installed Plume pods for the mesh wifi. I thought I would wait until they left and put my Orbis in but to my shock, I liked the Plumes.
Because this is a big house, even with three Plume pods there are dead spots. I'm trying to figure out how to get the most bang out of these old Orbis. I have one base station and two satellites. The Plumes are very smart about the ethernet ports. If you plug in an uplink, the pod becomes a repeater. If it has no uplink, the pod becomes a bridge adapter.
The RBW30 satellites have no Ethernet ports so I can't use them as bridges. I wonder if there is some mode they can go in to where they will participate with the Plume mesh. Can OpenWRT even do that? This is a big research topic on which I have a very shaky understanding. Netgear loves telling me how EOL this is so I lose nothing but farting around with them. It just remains to be seen if or how they can be useful.







