NETGEAR RBK53S-100NAS (Open Box)

I have had and used this system for over a year. Never have I wanted more to take a baseball bat to something I spent $400 on. Problem #1 The daisychain is a lie I have this system for a set up where I need to daisychain the two satellites to reach a room further away from the router, so Router --> Satellite 1 --> Satellite 2. I need this just for watching Netflix, not anything with quick ping, so the small delays that daisychaining introduces don't bother me. The system supposedly supports this; there is even a toggle to turn daisychaining on and off. (There's one on each Satellite's debug page, too) However, the system *always* defaults to what it thinks is "best" despite any user settings you may enable or disable. The Orbi system absolutely refuses to daisychain if Satellite 2 can connect to the router *at all* even if that connection is extremely poor. There is no way to force the daisychaining. Resetting the whole system and connecting the devices back in the specific order you want them sometimes enables daisychaining for a short period, but it will quickly revert back. When it is daisychained, I get about 300mbps on Satellite 2. When it reverts back and connects directly to the router, I get about 20mbps, which the system thinks is "better" (presumably because it prioritizes ping over throughput?). It reverts back to non-daisychained after anywhere between a few hours and a few days, and there is no way to stop it from doing this. Resetting all the devices is a laborious process that takes anywhere from 10-20 minutes. Problem #2 Hope you have backup internet The first-line diagnostic tool the system has is the ring LED on the router and satellites. The LEDs glow, blink, or pulse different colors at different speeds to supposedly tell you if there is an issue. However, the colors are meaningless (it's not green for good, and red for bad), meaning unless you memorize them you'll need to look them up to know what the colors mean when your internet stops working. Except...your internet has stopped working, so looking them up on the internet is rather difficult. Hope you have a second internet to fix your first internet. Problem #3 Real-time updates? Not here! There is, of course, also the Router admin interface. It's fairly logically laid out and has passable enough options, except that some of them are placebos (like the daisychain options). But the system is extremely unresponsive. The "Attached Devices" page has EXTREME lag in updating the displayed information, even when using the manual "refresh" button. You can physically unplug both satellites from power and watch the system continue to read both satellites as having a "good" connection with the router for up to 5-10 minutes after, even with multiple refreshes. Conclusion: I bought this system because I thought Netgear would know what they were doing. If you have a small house and simply want a few extra satellites to extend your range a little to get to bump the wifi in that one bedroom from 3 bars to 4, this is probably an OK system. But if you actually need to extend the range a bit more and take advantage of a true mesh network or daisychaining, stay away from this. This system will cause nothing but headache and won't solve your problem.