Netgear Orbi RBK23 Wi-Fi System Review & Comments

Greg Hook

Netgear's Whole Home Orbi Mesh Wi-Fi System looks set to banish those pesky Wi-Fi blackspots forever, but at £290 is it worth it?
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Joe C

Hi @Greg Hook - I bought the RBK50 set that comes with 2 satellites (the RBK53?), plus an extra one and following a firmware update last year, all the disconnection problems have disappeared.  Netgear have also enabled ethernet for the backhaul as well, which is incredibly handy for putting a satellite in my home cinema (a converted garage that seems to block all wifi signals) and our summer house (about 30m away from the house).  Now have full coverage absolutely everywhere and it hasn't dropped once foe longer than I can recall.

It's well, well worth getting.

Mister_Tad

Interesting - do they expose STP configuration in the management software, or anywhere in the documentation?

Mixing multiple wired nodes with mesh wireless has been giving Sonos users headaches for 10 years, seems set to start all over again with the emergence of consumer mesh wifi.

Joe C

They do not - and I'm quite thankful for that, as I have enterprise grade Cisco kit running the network in my house, and I experienced various problems with Sonos (and Sky Q) and STP.  Ultimately, when I had all the devices wired, I put the Sonos stuff on it's own VLAN and disabled STP on it.  Now the Wifi is so good everywhere, all my Sonos units are connected wirelessly

Mister_Tad

I wonder how it's managed in that case - presumably something proprietary to tell the other APs the topology. Not a bad approach to keep it a black (or white) box, but then clearly locks you in to their own gear.

IMO the issues with Sonos (and Sky Q from the sounds of it) comes from the fact that they just seem to assume "It's consumer gear, and consumers don't need to worry about this stuff", hiding it away. Of course having a large and Sonos setup and managed networking gear seem to go hand and hand, and problems ensue.

Sonos would be fine if they would only expose the configuration in an advanced page somewhere, at the very least letting you adjust paths costs, or even better updating to support RSTP that's only been around for, oh 15 years or so. I've disabled wireless on all but one of my wired players just so I can keep RSTP and not have to put up with the long convergence times of classic STP.

witchdrash

Ironically I've had most of my coverage problems in new build houses. The ones I've lived in the entire downstairs wall structure has been built of concrete block to spread the load from the upper stories of the house, this means wifi travels vertically very well, but poorly horizontally, and has required in our current house two unifi access points upstairs that provide the downstairs rooms directly below them with wifi, trying to get the signal to travel from where the router is across downstairs is a complete non-starter.

Joe C

Yep, it’s exactly that - they assume (quite rightly) that most people won’t care about it.  We few that do, end up having headaches as there’s very little info out there

crabby09

Ok... So... I am in the mood for some learning!

What makes this better than a wifi powerline adapter the other end of the house?

Joe C

Throughput and reliability.  I put an AV1200 powerline set in, on brand new wiring, with massive overkill for the cabling going up to the summerhouse - speedtest on my 200MB Virgin connection topped out at 70mb/s.

Switching to the Orbi, connected via Ethernet I get whatever my line tops out at (usually 225mb/s).  The TV in there also streams full UHD HDR rips from my NAS in the house without skipping a beat - was a buffering nightmare with the home plug.  The homeplug would frequently drop as well, requiring one end to be rebooted

Obviously I'm aware I could get this by just plugging another network switch in and hardwiring the TV, but I still want reliable, fast ethernet up there

For the main house, it's a three storey one (top storey is a loft conversion) - have the router in the living room where the Virgin comes in, a satellite in the back bedroom up one storey, and another satellite hard wired in my home cinema as mentioned in my first post (as that room is impervious to wifi signals) - I get full bars coverage everywhere in the house.

Am genuinely impressed with this system, has done away with powerline, second hard wired routers  etc and replaces it with one solution that works very well

Perm0115

I have the RBK50 ( twin unit ) and can now get 350 Mbps wireless throughout the house. Broadband is with virgin media. Also, have Sonos working without any issues.

In principle the RBK50 is faster as it has Tri-Band AC3000 (3.0 Gbps) as opposed to AC2200 for the RBK23 however I expect in the real world makes little difference.