How much do you love Wi-Fi? Enough to spend $699.99 on a new high-performance Orbi mesh network? The setup is so mind-blowingly sophisticated that Netgear has dubbed it the Orbi WiFi 6 System AX6000 (RBK852), calling it the “ultimate whole home wireless network” for multi-gigabit dwellings.
The Orbi tri-band WiFi 6 router boasts four times the network capacity of Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) solutions. It does this by maintaining the 4x4 wireless backhaul of the previous generation Orbi router, but bumps it to Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) for a theoretical link of 2.4 Gbps compared to 1.73 Gbps on the older Orbi RBK50. The system was first teased at CES in January.
On the practical side, the package includes one RBR850 Wi-Fi router and one RBS850 satellite to cover six or more rooms with “fast Wi-Fi” in a 5,000-square-foot home, according to Netgear. You get 8 gigabit Ethernet LAN ports in total (four each on the router and satellite) and a 2.5Gbps WAN port for anyone lucky enough to have a service provider than can take full advantage of it. Netgear claims that its new mesh router can handle 20 streams at once and support more than 100 connected devices.
The WiFi 6 Orbi can be ordered now with availability set for September 30th.