For testing, Netgear sent us the RBE873B, a three-piece Black Edition system that costs $1,299.99 and offers 9,000 square feet of coverage. By comparison, three pieces for $1,699.99 Call Max 7 It covers an area of 7500 square feet. Netgear also offers a two-node system that covers 6,000 square feet for $999.99, and single-node satellites that provide 3,000 square feet of coverage cost $549.99 each. For aesthetics, you can also get the 870 Series in white.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The three-part system consists of one router node and two satellite nodes, and all three components have the same dimensions: 10.6 by 5.7 by 4.4 inches (HWD). Meanwhile, each node comes with eight internal antennas with high-power amplifiers.
For information about the status of the router, there is a small LED indicator that indicates several possible statuses. The LED lights up when the router is first powered on or synced, and solid white when the router is factory reset; a solid magenta LED indicates that the router is no longer connected to the Internet. If there is no light, it means that everything is working properly.
The LED on the satellite nodes lights up blue for three minutes, then turns off when the connection to the router is good. It turns solid amber when the connection is fair and solid red when the connection fails.
The back panel of the router node has a 10GbE WAN port and four 2.5GbE LAN ports, each satellite node has four 2.5GbE LAN ports that support wired transmission to the router. Both the router and satellite nodes have a sync button, a reset button, a power jack, and a power LED on the back panel. None of the nodes have USB ports, which are rare in mesh systems.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Orbi 870’s tri-band BE21000 system can reach maximum data speeds of up to 688Mbps on the 2.4GHz band, 8.640Mbps on the 5GHz band, and 11.520Mbps on the 6GHz band. Inside, the Orbi 870 is powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, 4GB of flash storage, and 2GB of RAM. It also supports the latest Wi-Fi 7 technologies, including MU-MIMO synchronous data streaming, 320MHz channel width, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) transmissions, 4K QAM, direct-to-client beamforming and WPA3 encryption. You’ll also get multi-link operation (MLO) technology to combine the 5GHz and 6GHz bands for improved backend performance.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
