Netgear RBK50-100NAR Orbi Home Mesh Wi-Fi System (Renewed)

I bought the Orbi RBK50 system because it was written up in many places as being the best mesh system on the market. It took several attempts to set up correctly, but I was willing to roll with that as the price to pay for a good house-covering wifi system. I finally got everything set up, and was pleased with the coverage I was getting. It was great for the first week. Then things started going wrong.At first, there were a few signal drop-outs. It happened maybe every other day, and the system seemed to be reconnecting after the drop outs. It was a pain when our streaming kept getting interrupted, but it was better than what things were like before the mesh system. Then the drop-outs started happening more frequently. Then the self re-connecting stopped, and I had to start powering down the router and powering it back up.Online research showed that this was not terribly uncommon. And there weren't any solutions I could find that actually worked.When I had to reset the router's power three times in an hour, I was done. I picked up Google's mesh system, and I was blown away by how incredibly fast and easy the set up was! The Google mesh network is not as powerful as the Orbi, but it hasn't had even as much as a hiccup, and I had all three nodes set up and placed around the house in about 15 minutes. That's less than a quarter of the time I spent setting up the Orbi system.

I purchased this system based on the recommendation of a neighbor. We sent it up and used it for a day. We loved it. Unfortunately, 24 hours was all we got. We called amazon customer support who had us on hold for 20 minutes to get netgear customer support, only to find out we were transferred to the completely wrong department. As I waited those 20 minutes, I got on the regular (not refurbished) product page and saw that many one star reviews had my same problem. The network simply failed to show up despite reboot attempts, reinstall attempts, direct ethernet connection. Nothing worked. The other reviews attribute it to the firmware updates that shut everything down. Most those reviews thankfully mentioned that Netgear customer support stinks so I was prepared after my 20 minute wait. Before putting me on hold again, the rep wanted to register the product to me. I told her I did not want to do that because I was going to return it if we could not get it to work because I was still in the return window. In response, she said, "We have yet to ascertain if it is working or not." That really got me. Do you think I sat 20 minutes on hold for a product that was working? After spending over $200, give me the benefit of the doubt on this one. I told her that was the reason I was calling - that I had ascertained it was not working. She seemed unwilling to go forward if I would not register it to my name. Since I had not been given the correct department anyway, had read the reviews, and did not feel that Netgear customer support was at all helpful in getting to the problem (or even right person), I decided to cut my loses and return. But, beware, read the main product page. I do not think this was an issue with being refurbished. It sounds very similar to the other one star reviews. I am just lucky it happened so soon. This product is AWESOME when it works, but, as one reviewer said, you are seriously gambling on whether you will have a very expensive paperweight in a few months. Once you are past the return period, there is little to no help available. I will be researching again to find a system that reliably provide what I hoped I was getting with this system.

I have been using Netgear R7000 for 4+ years now. I really like the quality of Netgear routers, but hate the firmware instability. Every upgrade of R7000 has caused me one or the other headaches. But once you identify a good firmware version and stick to it; this router still is a very good hardware which I am really struggling to find a worthy contender to replace with.That was until I recently upgraded my R7000 to the latest firmware. My 5G signal strength dropped after that and despite going back to a firmware 1.5 year old, the signal strength is not the same. I still have signal for most part of the 3700 Sq feet house, but the data transfer speed and signal strength are much much lower than what it used to be (100+ mbps vs <10 mbps in different parts of the house).So I tried finding a better alternative than Netgear, but so far the multiple mesh wifi systems that I tried wasn't that great. So decided to give Netgear RBK50 a try. I already knew about the firmware issues and researched a way to disable automatic firmware upgrade (thanks to Netgear community); so was thinking it shouldn't be that big a deal.For most part of today I have been setting up RBK50. Initial setup took close to 20+ minutes, setting up the Router and Satellite and upgrading the firmware etc. Then ran into the issue of Skybell HD not working. It turns out a lot of people have this issue after the latest firmware upgrade. Thankfully someone had posted a way to resolve that and that worked for me too.Everything looked good and started testing the system by streaming some movies from my Plex server on NAS to the Nvidia Shield. After 15 minutes or so; the router and satellite started restarting taking turns. It went on for sometime and I noticed the same symptoms as others were complaining about with the latest firmware. I kept restarting the router and satellite and modem to see whether that solves anything, but nothing got better.That's fine and that is what I have come to expect from the crappy firmware Netgear releases. So I downgraded router and satellite to the previous version, which seems to have been stable for most people based on Netgear community. Also disabled the automatic firmware upgrade using telnet. But even after that the router and satellite kept restarting. I was re-configuring and restarting things for some more time and finally things started looking stable. By now I had spent close to four hours setting this up.Things were looking better now and my internet speed throughout the house was 250+ Mbps. Streaming of 40GB HD movies were happening flawlessly on multiple devices. But wanted to continue streaming some movies for couple of hours to check stability of the router. Today is a holiday and I can't afford an internet downtime on working days as I work from my home office. So wanted to finish all the testing today.After more than an hour into streaming movies, all my devices lost WIFI connection as the router was doing a restart of it's own. The satellite stopped responding even after router bounced back.By this time I had enough with Orbi. This was the same as R7000, were going back in firmware still doesn't get the stability what it once had.I should say that for the one plus hour it worked, it was a really great mesh network. Good speed through out; close to 450 mbps local wireless lan throughput (iperf and file copy based test), great range etc. Just that I was hoping for a lot lot lot more stability than it could offer.And that's the story of how I decided I will never every buy another Netgear product.I never had the courage to buy Orbi with only one year of warranty, considering the issues with NG firmware I know of. Amazon refurbished gave option to buy it with 4 years of warranty which made a lot more sense than buying new.

I bought this product in 2019 based on different reviews that placed it in top for the throughput.However close to the router, I usually got 400/500Mb when my internet provider writer offered close to 800Mb at the same location.The 4 Ethernet port are appreciate for devices with only a cable connection. Orbi offers several advanced features like VPN server, DDNS, Disney circle for Internet access management for the users,...For almost 1 year, I was overall satisfied, even if I couldn't fully enjoy my gigabit connection.A few months ago, the router stopped working with no apparent reason. No internet access, no access to the administration web page,... After a few research, I managed to flash a firmware with the TFTP method and the router was good to go again... For some more time... Recently, after I restarted the router because the wifi performance has drastically dropped, the router didn't reboot properly and was back in limbo. But this time, The TFTP method didn't allow to recover the system. So I though I could ask support to netgear but I found out that netgear offers only 3 months of support and we have to pay after that if we need help. The only help you can get for free after 3 months is the community with the forum. Which couldn't help with my issue.Only 3 months of support is crazy for such an expensive device (about 700$ in 2019). Now my orbi is 1 year and 3 months old and unusable, ready to go to garbage. I can't believe it..

The condition of my items were in pretty mint condition (YMMV of course) and the setup was a fairly easy process. While you don't require any apps to install the router to the satelite its a much easier process if you do have there app downloaded. The range, speed and reliability is also significantly better to my previous wifi mesh setup (samsung connect home pro) and after 2 months of use I have yet to have any disconnects of any kind or speed inconsistencies.Less is more seems to be very true with the Orbi mesh, with the samsung I've had 3 pucks throughout the house and yet this only requires just one satelite and I've actually found the range and speed to be actually significantly better. I highly suggest this setup if your main router for example is too far from your basement or living room, it really made streaming like netflix, youtube or live games better and the connection was significantly more stable and faster for gaming as well.

Amazing coverage of a fairly large area on two floors with WiFi speeds comparable to hardwire. Everything that they promise and more.....easy to setup as well!! This one is more expensive but worth the extra cost.

The connection is so unstable if you have too many IPs. The router has good signal but very unstable. internet may drop frequently.

Very good quality and gives very good signal with very fast speed.