Netgear Orbi RBKE963 review 2024: excellent performance

Netgear’s Orbi RBKE963 AXE11000 is the best choice if you want a Wi-Fi mesh system that uses the latest wireless technology to give you fast Wi-Fi all over your home. This three-piece mesh system is made for very big homes and is full of high-quality hardware, like Wi-Fi 6E circuitry that lets it work on the less-crowded 6GHz band. You’ll also find 12 high-performance antennas inside and rare 10Gbps WAN and 2.5Gbps LAN ports. It’s by far the fastest mesh system we’ve looked at so far, and at $1,499.99, it’s also the most expensive. Still, you can justify the price if you need the Orbi RBKE963’s high-end specs, large coverage area, and fast performance, which makes it a clear choice for an award.

Netgear Orbi RBKE963 Specifications

Netgear Orbi RBKE963: Design

With the Orbi RBKE963 kit, the designers, engineers, and software writers at Netgear have brought mesh routing into the high-performance Wi-Fi 6e age. Both the router and the satellites have the rounded tower shape that is unique to Orbi, but they are very big at 11.1 x 7.5 x 3 inches. That’s seven times the size of Amazon’s Eero mesh units and twice as big as Asus’s ZenWiFi AXE XT8 mesh units, which are already big. We’re used to seeing Orbi routers in white with chrome accents, but the RBKE963 also comes in a limited-edition black colour.

Software and Setup

The Dashboard of the Orbi apps showed me how many satellites were live and how they could be set up. On a grid layout, we could see Device Manager, which told me how many client devices were linked, and Security, which told me how the Armour security software was doing. There were also links on the interface that let you check the current network speed and signal level and see a map of the network. You can buy this wififrom its official website

Performance and Features

We started with the 6GHz band to see how well the Netgear Orbi RBKE963 worked. We connected a laptop with a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet adapter to the satellite using my Z690 computer as the server. We got an average speed of 1143Mbps when we used the TamoSoft speed Test. We got an average speed of 934Mbps when we ran the same test with only Gigabit Ethernet. As you can see, 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E can sometimes be faster than Ethernet. In the future, who will want cables. Moving on to my usual tests, we used a standard Wi-Fi 6 laptop to test performance around my house. We saw speeds of 508.34Mbps when we were close to the router. This is a little lower than the same test on the RBK852, but because of interference at different times of the day, Wi-Fi tests often show different results.

Pricing and availability

If I’m being honest, the Netgear Orbi Wi-Fi 6E (RBKE963) costs an eye-popping £1,499.99 ($1,499.99) in the UK. Even with a router and two satellites, this is a lot of money to spend on a mesh networking setup. Are there mesh networking methods that are less expensive? Absolutely. Is this deal offered by anyone? No. It is also a huge investment in the future.

Final Words

The Orbi RBKE963 from Netgear is the best of the bunch. This is the best mesh system in terms of how well it works, what it can do, and how safe it is. The mesh network’s quad-band design, dedicated 5-GHz backhaul channel, and Wi-Fi 6e features, along with Netgear’s Armour security software, make it fast and safe to use the internet. The $1,500 price tag for the Orbi RBKE963 shows that it is what other mesh systems wish they could be.

The Orbi RBKE963 is one of the easiest mesh systems to handle because Netgear routers let you set up and manage them using a connected browser or a smartphone app. But its units are big and hard to hide, it only comes with free tech support for 90 days and a one-year warranty, and it might be too much for people who don’t have gigabit internet or who don’t live in a huge house.

Netgear Orbi RBKE963 reviewThe good and The bad

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