Netgear Orbi
Widen your Wi-fi in style
Mesh routers are the next big thing in Wi-fi, using multiple boxes to spread reception evenly around your home and avoid the drop-outs and dead spots we’ve all grown accustomed to. We previously tested BT’S Whole Home Wi-fi (see our review, Issue 496), which comprises three impressive-looking dishes. Netgear’s Orbi provides just two vase-like routers, but quotes the same maximum speeds on the 2.4GHZ and 5GHZ wavebands and claims to cover 4,000 square feet – four times the size of the average British house.
As with BT’S setup, the units look identical, but one plugs into your existing broadband router while the other acts as a satellite unit elsewhere. Again, you can add more if you need them, so Orbi could provide Wi-fi throughout a large venue. Wi-fi devices such as your PC, phone and tablet see the same network regardless of which router is nearest. The two units come ready-paired, so there’s not much to do to get them working except plug them into the mains and set up a name and password for your network.
It’s all much more straightforward than using a conventional Wi-fi extender. Rather than choosing whether you let older 2.4GHZ and newer 5GHZ devices share the same network for convenience, or split them to let the 5GHZ network go faster, the Orbi uses band steering to optimise everything as it happens. Geekier users might miss the manual control, but for most of us it means things work fine without fiddling about.
In our tests, speeds close to the base unit were excellent, and in rooms one or two floors up we still got great reception, although a top-end conventional router could beat it. The real benefit was when we positioned the satellite unit to bridge longer distances, out to the back kitchen and garden. Here the Orbi was nearly 10 times quicker than relying on a single router, and where a single router couldn’t reach at all, the Orbi was nearly as fast.
Both Orbi and BT Whole Home Wi-fi work well. It’s hard to say which would perform better in any given situation. BT’S system is cheaper and probably more flexible in reaching multiple locations. However, while Orbi has three free Ethernet ports on the base (see image left) and four on the satellite for wired connections, the BT dishes have just one.
It’s easy to set up and automatically optimises your broadband