Netgear Orbi Pro SXK80
While probably too much for the home, the SXK80 could be ideal for a small business
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PRICE £644 (£773 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318net4
There are plenty of wireless systems that focus on gaming and video streaming – but if you’re kitting out a home office (or any kind of workplace), you might prefer a more professional approach. That what the Orbi Pro promises, with a distinctive feature set that focuses on work rather than play.
The difference in attitude is clear as soon as you lay eyes on the Orbi Pro units. The warm curves of Netgear’s domestic meshes are replaced by a more angular design, with a bold vertical strip-light to alert you to any error states. There’s also a wallmounting kit in the box – although you may have to work around the fact that the power supplies only have 2m cables, and PoE isn’t supported.
Although each node uses the same tri-band radio arrangement as the RBK752 and RBK852 systems, the Pro SXK80 units broadcast four separate SSIDs. These come predefined as administrative, employee, IoT and guest networks, and while you can configure them individually, they have some specific hard-coded features: for example, you can only enable band splitting on the employee and IoT VLANs, while the guest network supports user authentication either via a local passcode or Facebook.
To handle this multi-network setup, the Orbi Pro uses a faster 5GHz client radio than its domestic brethren, claiming speeds of up to 2,400Mbits/sec. If you’re hoping for an enterprise-grade speed boost, though, you’ll likely be disappointed. In our tests the SXK80 successfully delivered blanket Wi-Fi coverage to every corner of our home, but performance tended to be a touch behind the RBK852,
All told, the Orbi Pro is overkill for homeworkers: it doesn’t turbo-charge your connection, it just gives you more to manage. That’s exacerbated by the fact that it lacks Netgear’s Armor security module, not to mention parental controls, so if you want network-level protection or time limiting or you’ll have to source and administer separate solutions.
For a small business, classroom or retail unit, however, this could be the ideal Wi-Fi 6 mesh kit. It offers a very easy way to get a strong signal over a wide area, while the multiple VLANs provide stronger security and more granular manageability than you’ll get from any regular mesh system.