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I've had two out of three Orbi RBK50 kits and one RBK852 (wifi 6 models) fail almost immediately for me. Horrible satellite speeds, main router locking up and rebooting multiple times daily, just a generally horrible experience. Obviously that's a small sample group but 75% failure rate is enough to make me never touch the brand again. Maybe the pros are different, but I wouldn't get my hopes up
I have a different tri band mesh Orbi product that is relatively new. Pretty fast and excellent coverage, however they rush their firmware before proper testing. The most recent release of the Orbi firmware got messed up due to daylight saving time. Then when I called I found they require you to pay for $80/yr subscription tech support even when the product is under the 1 year warranty window. So, a good product if it doesn't break, but if it does be prepared to go buy a new one even within the warranty period.
Was previously look at the ASUS CT8 till it went out of stock everywhere for $300. Takes a month to get in stock so ordered this instead from B&H. Will report how it goes. It's for a home where a new Spectrum provided AC router won't reach a certain room.
I have an original orbi and it's been a decent mesh router but I did have intermittent issues with wifi that required restarts. I ended up buying a ubiquiti access point and plugged that into the orbi router. Haven't had an issue since.
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I've had two out of three Orbi RBK50 kits and one RBK852 (wifi 6 models) fail almost immediately for me. Horrible satellite speeds, main router locking up and rebooting multiple times daily, just a generally horrible experience. Obviously that's a small sample group but 75% failure rate is enough to make me never touch the brand again. Maybe the pros are different, but I wouldn't get my hopes up
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Apr 25, 2021 1:45 AM
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I have a different tri band mesh Orbi product that is relatively new. Pretty fast and excellent coverage, however they rush their firmware before proper testing. The most recent release of the Orbi firmware got messed up due to daylight saving time. Then when I called I found they require you to pay for $80/yr subscription tech support even when the product is under the 1 year warranty window. So, a good product if it doesn't break, but if it does be prepared to go buy a new one even within the warranty period.
I bought this last week from Amazon for the same price. It's a garbage product.
1. Netgear forces you to type your password during account creation, making password generators hard to use.
2. You have the option of changing the admin username during setup, but the app forces your to log in as 'admin', so you can't use the app without changing the username back to 'admin'.
3. Getting the satellite to connect was troublesome. I don't remember if i was able to get it connected before giving up.
4. The app kept flipping back to the 'searching for device' screen, which basically breaks any activity you were doing.
If you read the orbi subreddit, these and more seem to be common issue, and new and exciting issues are added with every firmware update.
Maybe once everything is working it's an ok router, after an hour or two of toying with it I decided to not risk it and return it.
This is an excellent router for the hoi pilloi. Strong coverage. More than sufficient speeds. Tri-band. Business router that provides for multiples SSIDs. Mesh, etc. a few potential drawbacks: no WPA3 encryption. No WiFi 6.
Note for anyone looking to get the Orbi system, I had this unit before, out of the three bands you can only use the first 2 with a max speed of 866mbps, the third band is the higher speed one (1700mbps) and that is only for the wireless backhaul, even if you connect it with an Ethernet cable you still lose out on the third band
Now at this price I would recommend this unit, however at original price I would recommend something else if you want true triband functionality
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I bought this model when it came out and added an extra satellite to work in a hub and spoke configuration. Hardware wise, this is a good product but the software is beyond awful when you compare to other brands like asus, linksys or tplink. I also pay for the netgear insight subscription service which does enhance the product a lot. Here is the thing though, aside from cloud access and email notifications, the other features with insight are built in to other brand consumer solutions. The software features on these mesh routers have been purposely crippled so that netgear can sell you them through a premium subscription. Their service is awful as well. Expect them to feed you the basic workflow of resetting the base router plus satellites and repairing them just so they can resolve your issue. This is annoying but you need to physically touch a button to pair the base with the satellites. It's also takes a few minutes to pair. Also, expect the issue to resurface after a week. I don't even care about this mesh router anymore. I'm waiting until it becomes unusable and I will buy a new one from a different brand. I don't think I will purchase a netgear product ever again. My router has been spamming curl errors and the router web server will sometimes fail. Sometimes certain satellites will be in a semi working state where just wan traffic is broken. Below some screenshots of the dashboard warnings and how netgear still categorized it as being okay. I can't think of any good reason why you should buy this product. Netgear disabled and hid a lot of features and in the process broke a lot of functionality. Here's some screenshots for proof. https://imgur.com/a/u1psBRW I'm only still using it because I already dropped almost $1k fooling myself into thinking this was a good product.
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I have been renting their router and would love to not pay their equipment fee...
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1. Netgear forces you to type your password during account creation, making password generators hard to use.
2. You have the option of changing the admin username during setup, but the app forces your to log in as 'admin', so you can't use the app without changing the username back to 'admin'.
3. Getting the satellite to connect was troublesome. I don't remember if i was able to get it connected before giving up.
4. The app kept flipping back to the 'searching for device' screen, which basically breaks any activity you were doing.
If you read the orbi subreddit, these and more seem to be common issue, and new and exciting issues are added with every firmware update.
Maybe once everything is working it's an ok router, after an hour or two of toying with it I decided to not risk it and return it.
I have been renting their router and would love to not pay their equipment fee...
Now at this price I would recommend this unit, however at original price I would recommend something else if you want true triband functionality
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