If you have been waiting for an opportunity to take something like the Netgear Nighthawk X10 and mash it up with a high-end mesh system, you might be excited about this one. This is a mesh solution that brings with it enough bandwidth for any home no matter how many devices you have scattered about (at least, for now). This is the new Netgear Orbi Quad-band WiFi 6E Mesh System (model RBKE963B). A system that supplies up to 10.8Gbps for all of your needs.
You get three units, including one main router and two satellites to extend your coverage with, covering up to 9,000 square feet of space. The main unit offers a 10Gbps WAN input, allowing you to bring connections much faster than your (current) average home ISP has to offer. This is big as it allows you to maximize all of this bandwidth for the internet as well vs being limited to what’s locally on your network. Since you have all of this throughput coming in, Netgear made sure that your wired devices don’t get left out, as all three units have a 2.5Gbps port for devices and switches that support the same. Along with three (normal) 1Gbps ports, each.
This is one crazy fast mesh system, supporting 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz networks for your home or business (can’t forget the small to mid-size businesses that could easily take advantage of this).
Not only that, but you have a little extra configuration space for all of your devices. You are able to create separate networks for both the 6E as well as a dedicated network just for your IoT devices so that they can separate from everything else (sensitive computers, drives, etc). This could lead to much better security since IoT is so huge and filled with vulnerabilities that are constantly under attack.
The only catch is the price. MSRP is $1,499, which is a lot of hard-earned cash. It also appears that it may be exclusive to Netgear’s website only on top of that (currently taking pre-orders). Therefore, it may not make its way to stores. Likely due to the fact that it will have such a small niche looking to buy into it, given the average consumer may run away at the cost. Update: This is available for pre-order from Amazon here.
However, if you are exactly who’d you find in that niche, then you might just want to give this one a try. We still have a way to go before bandwidth like this becomes obsolete, making for a great place to future-proof things. When 8K graphics and other resource-intense technologies become a standard, then we may look at this as fast vs insane, but until then, it is quite the step ahead.
There is no exact ship date just yet as Netgear has only said: “in time for the holidays”.
We can’t wait to learn more about how well it does in the real world once it rolls out into the market. There is a lot of potential with this one.
1 Comment
Any plans on reviewing this one? I’d like to see how well the system performs in real-world conditions.