Orbi RBR50 Upgrade?

[cutepolarbear]

Hi, I am not very technology savvy and went with RBR50 (very first gen orbi I think) when it first came out for my home wifi (stock latest firmware), and been happy with its reliability overall. With a lot more household members and the corresponding devices (connected, wireless devices, home NAS, roku, steam downloads, and etc.,), I feel like I'm getting bottlenecked, even within intranet. Should I upgrade to the newer orbi's (is it worth the $, relatively speaking)? or should I look for another mesh brand? Thank you.

 

[sfx2000]

happy with its reliability overall

Stay with what you have for now - the first gen Orbi's are still relevant...

 

[tgl]

There are probably people around here who are better qualified to answer than I am, but seeing that nobody has commented yet, here's my two cents. I bought an RBR850 base + 2x RBS850 satellites back in 2021, and was happy with them for a little while, but soon grew disillusioned. My gripes might not matter much to you though:

• As a privacy-paranoid person, I didn't like being forced to create a netgear.com account to use the things at all.
• The web configuration GUI was both clunky and not very featureful. (If you're used to/happy with the RBR50, it's unlikely this is a problem for you.)
• Performance and stability were a bit erratic, though I can't be sure how much of the blame for that fell on my mostly-Apple client devices.
• Forced firmware updates whenever Netgear thinks it's a good idea are not my idea of a good plan. I had auto-update disabled but the units didn't seem to actually honor that.

I got rid of the things within six months; the last straw was when I woke up to find a bricked base station, apparently because of a forced firmware update overnight that hadn't gone quite right. I was able to recover by factory-resetting the base station, but I ordered some ASUS gear the same day.

Having said all that, I'm not sure what else to recommend you in the consumer WiFi space. The ASUS XT8s I bought sucked differently, but not much less. I've been pretty happy since then with Zyxel and now Ubiquiti gear, but those are a significant step up in cost and management complexity from what I think you're looking for, and I don't want to make it sound like they're nirvana because they're not.

You could do worse than jumping to ASUS, for sure. There is a ton of expertise in this website's community about those products. Peruse the threads in the ASUS sub-forums for awhile, and pick some gear that is generally well spoken of.

 

[cutepolarbear]

Thank you both for input. Prior to my Orbi, I remember going through wireless router / hell / reliability (odd) problems with different routers, including Asus, Linksys, Netgear, and etc., I guess newer technology / features (wow..almost 8 years since RBR50 was introduced) and what not brings different (some same) set of problems, with each brand / each revision. Definitely not looking for absolute top of line speed (and feature) in terms of mesh, mainly improved bandwidth (I guess for my intranet, it's backhaul(?)) and same stability. I did a bit browsing, people seem to have a lot more complaints regarding the newer Orbi. Asus router lately seem to have decent feedback overall; maybe I'll forego the Mesh (maybe there's less issues then?) and just go with an updated tri-band router.

 

[tgl]

I did a bit browsing, people seem to have a lot more complaints regarding the newer Orbi. Asus router lately seem to have decent feedback overall; maybe I'll forego the Mesh (maybe there's less issues then?) and just go with an updated tri-band router.

You didn't go into what your situation is. If you can avoid using wireless mesh, you will be better off for both performance and reliability ... but how large an area do you need to cover, and what sort of interior walls do you need to penetrate? There's a very definite limit to what you can do with one AP. If you have enough space to need multiple APs, is there any chance of running wired backhaul (either ethernet or MoCA)? There's definitely cases where wireless mesh is the only reasonable choice, but it tends to be more finicky than wired backhaul.

 

[cutepolarbear]

Right. I had a mesh because I was living in a fairly big home in the suburbs. Recently I moved into a 1700 square foot apartment highrise, so likely I don't need a mesh. There's more noise / walls and etc., I guess with high rise apartment. Perhaps like you mentioned, just go with a reliable router. There's also the option of those powerline lan things I guess? But I don't believe they are any faster than wireless these days.

 

[L&LD]

PLA's are the worst forms of network connectivity. Only test as a last resort, and even then, you will probably find the variability to not be worth the cost.

 

[tgl]

Right. I had a mesh because I was living in a fairly big home in the suburbs. Recently I moved into a 1700 square foot apartment highrise, so likely I don't need a mesh. There's more noise / walls and etc., I guess with high rise apartment. Perhaps like you mentioned, just go with a reliable router. There's also the option of those powerline lan things I guess? But I don't believe they are any faster than wireless these days.

As @L&LD says, avoid PLAs if you can. However, that says little about whether you need more than one AP. A high-rise apartment can be a fairly hostile wifi environment compared to suburbia, because you likely have a lot more nearby wifi neighbors. For comparison's sake, I recently moved into a 1900sqft highrise apartment, and I've settled at three APs. Which is probably overkill, but I tried one and then two and wasn't satisfied with either. My space is extremely long and narrow (about 85'x25'), and the reasonable places to put APs are all along one long wall, and there is an elevator hoistway intruding into that wall and blocking signal. So it's not a very wifi-friendly space, even ignoring the heavily wifi'd neighbors. You might have a less problematic situation, but you haven't mentioned anything about layout or interior wall construction or neighbors.

 

[glens]

For something like that multiple APs at reduced power would work a treat. But that defacto rules out AiMesh...

 

[tgl]

For something like that multiple APs at reduced power would work a treat. But that defacto rules out AiMesh...

Yup. I'm using Ubiquiti APs running at very low power. Kind of an expensive solution compared to some, but it works well.

 

[cutepolarbear]

Area of high rise apartment roughly 1700 square feet. 2.5 bed rooms and 2 baths and 1 guest shower. Flooring is concrete, walls are mostly drywall with metal studs, quite a lot of them, including closets. Floor plan for rooms are fairly rectangular and stacked 2 x 4. bath has marble walls.

 

[tgl]

OK, drywall is pretty wifi-transparent. Metal studs not so much, but at typical spacing they won't pose much of a problem for signal passing through perpendicular to the wall. (A signal coming in at a low angle might not get through too well, though.) Not sure about marble. You might be OK with a single centrally located router, but personally I'd probably try to use two located well apart from each other. Do you have wifi dead spots with the existing router?

 

[cutepolarbear]

I took my old 8 year old orbi with 2 orbi extenders and using it in my apartment. With main unit, no sattelite, no wifi deadspots but definitely very weak signal at farthest end. I currently have the Orbi main unit at lower left corner (internet source), 1 orbi satellite to the right, and another orbi satellite somewhat middle, forming a triangle. Not very easy to move the main unit.

 

[tgl]

Yeah, you're generally stuck with putting the main router at the ISP entry point, or at least within convenient ethernet-cable run of there. Is there any chance of running a cable from the entry point to your "somewhat middle" location? If so, it's plausible that you could get away with a single wifi router placed there. If you can't do that, I'd suggest a two-unit mesh solution with the main unit at the entry point and the other at the middle location. I'm doubting you need three units.

 

[cutepolarbear]

HAHA. Of course it's physically possible to run a physical ethernet cable to middle of the floorplan, my wife will probably divorce me / my dog will chew it up in no time. I'll try the 2 unit mesh and see how that goes.

 

[L&LD]

There are cable tracks and ceilings you can use too (for a wired backhaul).

 

[sfx2000]

Stay with what you have for now - the first gen Orbi's are still relevant...

Reason why I say "stay with what you have" - we're close to a transition over to 802.11be, e.g WiFi7

No need to do something now, as those devices are selling at a serious price premium, and as such, are poor value...

 

[tgl]

Reason why I say "stay with what you have" - we're close to a transition over to 802.11be, e.g WiFi7

Meh ... there's certainly a conversation to be had here about how long the OP wants to be using any gear he might buy today. But he's only now starting to be dissatisfied with his AC-class router, so he's not somebody who's chasing the latest shininess. So far nobody has even suggested he buy WiFi 6E gear, let alone WiFi 7.

My take on this is that you buy new gear when your old gear no longer does what you need. Waiting a year because you'll be able to get better new gear then is not a very helpful plan, because that will pretty much always be true at any point in time.

 

[sfx2000]

Meh ... there's certainly a conversation to be had here about how long the OP wants to be using any gear he might buy today. But he's only now starting to be dissatisfied with his AC-class router, so he's not somebody who's chasing the latest shininess.

Yeah, but the OG orbi's were actually pretty good for 1st gen mesh systems over WiFi5-802.11ac...

Bandwidth annihilators they were, but they are still functional...

Yeah, the FW is getting old, as Netgear has moved on, but that's not different anymore than the R7800 - which was also a good device in it's day...

FOMO - now is not the time to buy gear if you're current situation is "good enough".

WiFi7 stuff on the market is based on draft's of the final specifications...

Let's talk next spring - 2025 - it'll be mainstream, and prices will adjust accordingly...

 

[tgl]

FOMO - now is not the time to buy gear if you're current situation is "good enough".

I quite agree, but it sounded like the OP no longer finds his current gear "good enough". Limping along for another year in hopes of paying a-bit-less-than-top-dollar for WiFi 7 gear wouldn't be my recommendation if he's got pain today, especially if he has no WiFi 7 clients nor any near-term plans to acquire some.