![]() I tested that system along with the new Netgear Orbi and several other mesh routers in my smallish, 1,300-square-foot home in Louisville, Kentucky, where I have a 300Mbps fiber internet connection. ![]() I haven't tested that system for myself, but I have looked at the similar Netgear Orbi Voice, which takes the original Orbi design and adds built-in Alexa speakers. The new Netgear Orbi wasn't quite as fast as the competition in a real-world setting, but it held its own against them despite costing a lot less. The question is, can it keep up with other mesh systems as far as speeds are concerned? Still, I think that most will be perfectly fine with this simplified, stripped down version of the Netgear Orbi since it nets them a mesh network at less than a third the cost it did before. After the trial, that service costs $70 per year. The Orbi does not, though it does come with a 30-day trial of Netgear Armor, which provides antivirus protection for the devices on your network and other additional security-minded features. The Nest Wifi also supports the new WPA3 security protocol. My upgrade pick, the Nest Wifi, includes four antennas and support for 4x4 MU-MIMO connections, which means it can aggregate faster combined speeds for devices like the MacBook Pro that support such connections. The smaller system also includes just a pair of antennas, which means it can only support the most basic of simultaneous-antenna MU-MIMO connections (2x2). That means that you can't wire the extender back to the router for faster performance, and if you have devices like smart home hubs, gaming consoles or media streamers that you'd like to wire to the router itself, there's only room for one of them.Ä«etween that, the lack of extra Ethernet jacks, and the loss of that dedicated backhaul band, I think Netgear might have been wise to brand this system as "Orbi Lite" or something similar. There's only one to spare on the router, and none on the extenders. Turn the things around, and you'll also notice that most of the extra Ethernet jacks are gone, too. ![]() It's still a dual-band system that can automatically steer you between connections on the 2.4 and 5GHz bands as you move about your home, but there isn't a second 5GHz band reserved for the router to send data back and forth to the range extenders anymore. This isn't just a cosmetic refresh - along with the size of the devices, the new Orbi also downsized the hardware inside to help bring costs down. There's only one spare Ethernet jack in the back of the Orbi router, and no Ethernet jacks in the back of the Orbi satellite at all. If you just need something that'll get the job done (and perhaps tide you over until you're ready to upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 in a year or two), then give the new Netgear Orbi some strong consideration. It's far from the fanciest system you can buy, but it delivers the benefits of mesh networking at the most reasonable price currently available. Most importantly, the new Netgear Orbi represents true value in the router aisle. ![]() It didn't route my signal quite as well as the Nest or Eero as I moved about my house, and the sparse app isn't as helpful or easy to use, but it still tested well overall. And in our range tests, the new Orbi beat the Nest and Eero outright with demonstrably better signal strength, particularly for multistory homes. In our performance tests, the Netgear Orbi proved just as speedy as the Nest and Eero on a reasonably fast internet connection of 300 megabits per second. The good news is that you almost certainly won't notice any of that. Read more: The best mesh Wi-Fi routers of 2019
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