NETGEAR Orbi Whole Home Tri-Band Mesh WiFi 6 System (RBK753) – Router with 2 Satellite Extenders | Coverage up to 7,500 sq. ft. and 40+ Devices | AX4200 (Up to 4.2Gbps)

Product Information

I do not think my household is special, in that we almost always use a lot of network products: several mobile phones, tablets and PC’s, wireless printer, three TV’s, various network players and wireless speakers. Smart doorbell, robot vacuum cleaner, blinds and garage door. Eventually, smart humidity meters, smoke alarms and district heating will also be installed. And it’s critical that everything talks together – and that it works! When speed was enough You don’t get any USB ports for connecting external storage, although given how little this feature is used, I don’t think that it’s a huge loss. The Orbi app is stupidly simple to use and I completed the configuration, including manually entering my ISP’s FTTP connection, WiFi configuration, connecting the two satellites, and a firmware update in about 15 minutes flat. I myself have a lightning-fast fiber network with 1 Gbps, which feels redundant since I only get a tenth of that speed on the wireless connection. Therefore, I was reely looking forward to testing my first Wi-Fi 6 (AX) mesh network. This communicates in a more advanced way than older systems, in that several commands are sent and received simultaneously between routes and satellites (nodes). In addition to increasing the network speed of Wi-Fi 6 compatible gadgets, the home network will be more stable with older gadgets as well. Peace of mind guaranteed! In theory, at least. Nighthawk – with potential for improvement

Finally, the big sync button is on the left-hand side of all the units. This is used to manually sync the units or add an additional satellite. The base station included the router, so we tried to connect this directly to the NBN with iiNet, and it worked, sort of. Every day the internet connection would be dropping - the wifi seemed to be working fine, but the router connection to the internet continued to drop out. As the baby of the Wi-Fi 6 range, the system runs a dual-band AX1800 network, which means that there’s no dedicated wireless network for communicating between satellites. Instead, clients and network communication needs to share the two networks. The competition has become a lot tougher, too. If you don’t want the hassle of a mesh system and don’t have any particular dead spots to deal with, then the Netgear Nighthawk RAX200 is faster, has a tri-band Wi-Fi 6 network for devices and all the ports that you could want.You also get three Gigabit Ethernet ports for connecting devices, which gives you a fair amount of scope. The Asus ZenWifi AX has very similar specs to the RBK752, although the Orbi system was just a touch faster in my tests. This seemed better, but then at completely random times the Orbi wifi connections would drop. The base station was always okay, but the satellites kept dropping connections, so our zoom calls were interrupted, connections to online systems had to be restarted. There was no obvious reason, no change in traffic or movement of wireless devices, nothing we could see that was causing these drop outs. With 50-feet separating the test machine from the router, the RBR750’s bandwidth dropped to 100.3Mbps. This is more than enough for most uses but was well behind the Eero Pro 6 (239.9Mbps), the Linksys Velop AX4200 (201.3Mbps) and the Netgear Orbi RBK852 (124.4Mbps). Orbi has added a whole list of features to the RBK753 that you might find useful. We’ve compiled a list of them for you:

That being said, it’s also the best spec we’ve tested so far, so we must temper expectations. Though, the performance on offer is brilliant for a 7 series Orbi mesh product. A close-up view of the router unit from the front and side. The units look incredibly good with the white and silver colour scheme. The separation gap lights up below the Orbi logo highlighting booting up and errors and then turns off when it’s in normal operation. That’s very similar performance, as you can see from the graph, to the Netgear Nighthawk Mesh WiFi 6 System. The Orbi app is simple to use and I completed the configuration, including manually entering my ISP’s FTTP connection, WiFi configuration, connecting the two satellites, and a firmware update in about 15 minutes flat.

The first impression of the Orbi network was a different league than with Nighthawk. It worked smoothly from the start, and has done since. I have now used it for over four months, and even though I have three floors, there are no problems with the coverage in the house with two boxes. The Internet is of course at its fastest in the immediate vicinity of the node or router (they are equal in terms of speed and coverage), but the speed never drops below 200 Mbps, so in practice it is twice as fast as the cheaper Nighthawk system – and also much more stable. I have not had to reboot the system once.

The Orbi RBK753 is limited in terms of what user-configurable options there are, especially when it comes to Wi-Fi.What you don’t get is Circle parental controls, which so far is not available on any Orbi WI-Fi 6 system; it’s only available on the older Wi-Fi 5 Orbi systems. That’s a real shame, as it’s a useful tool to have for parents, giving you internet filtering and access control features to children’s devices. The main differences, when it comes to the content included inside each new box, are the routers and satellites. The software features are also simplified in a few places, compared to Netgear’s standalone routers. For some reason, band splitting isn’t allowed on the Orbi platform, so you’ll have to operate both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks under the same name. Parental controls are entirely absent: the manufacturer says it’s working on adding support for the Circle app, but it hasn’t committed to any time frame. And, inevitably with no way to connect external storage, you miss out on file-sharing functions. Still, the web portal itself is neater than the Nighthawk variant and the smartphone app works well as a central point of management for your distributed network.