Performance didn't drop too much when we moved to the medium distance, with the NetGear Orbi averaging 193 Mbits/s in the line of sight test. With its MU-MIMO technology, the Orbi served several devices simultaneously. It stood up well to our informal saturation test, in which we played videos on Surface Pro 3 and iPad Pro tablets as a Samsung Tab Pro S moved data on and off a network-attached storage system and a MacBook Air played an online radio station. The video and audio came through on all devices without a skip, stutter or drop-out. Netgear Orbi RBK50 review: Setup and support The Orbi ships with a semi-random network name and a unique alphanumeric administrative passcode that should be safe enough to use during the short setup routine. Still, you should change both the name and code to something more personal as soon as possible. find your Orbi model numbers, look for the device product label on the bottom of your Orbi devices.

Netgear has taken the lead in the race to create a home Wi-Fi network system that all but sets itself up. The NetGear Orbi got off to a great start in our pair of close-range throughput tests, averaging 55 Mbits/s in the line of sight test. Our remaining evaluations looked at the data transfer performance of the NetGear Orbi and the other routers. For both the 5 GHz. and 2.4 GHz. bands, we conducted the same series of tests using the iPerf3 software, with the average result of three separate trials for each test being used for the final score. We ran a test with a short distance (10'), medium distance (35'), and a long-distance (70') between the router base and our test computer, including a line of sight and an interference test at the short and medium distances for a total of 5 different throughput tests for each router at each bandwidth. The NetGear Orbi got off to a great start in the 2.4 GHz. metric, outperforming many of its competitors. No Netgear software (bloatware) i.e. Disney Circle, Netgear Armor, Netgear Smart Parental Controls, Netgear interfaces, Netgear configuration utilities and synchronization tools, Netgear mobile app integration (Are these a pros or cons? you decide). We measured an average throughput for the NetGear Orbi of 216 Mbits/s with a direct line of sight between it and the computer.Much harder to configure. Each AP needs to be configured individually from its own interface. While this is typically a one time task, it still requires planning and testing. Although they look the same, the Orbi's router unit and satellite units are not interchangeable. You can't randomly decide which unit should be the router and which should be the repeater. With the Orbi router 30 feet and two walls away, the Orbi extension projected 429.1 Mbps to a laptop one floor above it — more than double Google Wifi's performance.

I saw the tecnique in a post recently. Alas, I did not cut and paste it into my "Orbi Tidbits" file. Decrease in throughput (vertical axis, in Mbps) per distance (horizontal axis, in feet). The Orbi has a smooth falloff, and its results over five test runs (thinner lines) were very consistent. (Image credit: Purch Labs) It’s a manual step to change each device to a satellite by deleting the WAN networks and connecting the ethernet port into the existing bridge. When the Orbi system is behaving strangely, one step that is often recommended is to update the firmware to the latest release. This may be not so much in hopes that it will fix the problem as in the realization that the first thing others will recommend is to update the firmware. Might as well get that out of the way. Anyway to associate RBK50 Voxell Firmware with another Openwrt router Belking Rt3200 for 802.11r Fast Transition?ATH10K-CT drivers - there are limits in the drivers that one doesn't have in the closed source QSDK - that being said, CT drivers are pretty good, and the upstream devs for that driver have insight under NDA from Qualcomm. The router can handle up to three satellites, but each satellite communicates directly with the host router in a hub-and-spoke arrangement, rather than in a true mesh topology that would let data pass from one satellite to another. Our final set of evaluations looked at the maximum effective range of these routers, as determined by how far away we could stream a video without buffering or lagging on our test computer when connected to each router's 2.4 GHz. network. We used this network since it will typically have more range than its higher frequency counterpart.

Configuration changes are isolated to the device or to the interfaces that are affected, reducing outages when something has to change.For compatibility information about Orbi Pro WiFi Systems, see Which Orbi Pro routers and satellites are compatible? The NetGear Orbi performed slightly worse in the 5 GHz. metric compared to its results in the 2.4 GHz. metric but it still did pretty well overall. The Orbi's performance dropped off with distance, but not as rapidly as the Google Wifi's. The throughput averaged 510.9 Mbps at 15 feet, 447.1 Mbps at 50 feet and 371.4 Mbps at 100 feet. Recently found out that the snapshot and release candidate versions of the base OpenWrt have support for the RBR50v1/RBS50v1 (it’s the same hardware anyways, by default it will ignore anything setup previously and setup a RBS50 to an RBR50). Was wondering if anyone else has been using the firmware and has any experiences? https://kb.netgear.com/31573/How-do-I-manually-upgrade-firmware-on-my-Orbi-router-using-orbilogin-co...