NETGEAR RBK753-100EUS

Product Information

It had trouble competing with other Wi-Fi 6 mesh routers when it came to sending a signal through 25 feet and a wall with 326.6Mbps available on the other side. Under the same conditions, the Netgear Orbi RBR852 moved 782.9Mbps, while the Linksys Velop AX4200 was able to deliver 525.7Mbp and the Eero Pro 6 coming in at 375.6Mbps. Very glad to see the internal boxes cardboard with minimal plastic use inside wrapping the router and satellites inside. Keep these in the box to use them again in the future and not fill up the landfill. Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply. A good shot of the router and satellites straight out of the box. It’s hard to tell immediately which one is which, so Orbi have handily labelled them for you to get you going. It’s hard to articulate just how easy Orbi and by extension, NETGEAR has made setting up the RBK753 for anyone, which for technology, is no mean feat! But the user interface is well laid out, and the steps are simple to follow.

With the satellite a floor above the router and the test system 50-feet away, the throughput it received was 209.4Mbps, or about half the 405.5Mbps that the Orbi RBK852 was capable of. That said, the Linksys Velop AX4200 (329.2Mbps) was impressive, nonetheless.It's somewhat annoying that you can't really buy extra satellites without spending almost the same as the whole system. I would've hoped to get the 1 satellite setup and upgrade to 2 if needed, but that's not very economical. One (1) 1Gbps Gigabit Ethernet WAN port - Orbi Satellite (each) Three (3) 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports This seemed better, but then at completely random times the Orbi wifi connections would drop. The base station was always okay, but the satellites kept dropping connections, so our zoom calls were interrupted, connections to online systems had to be restarted. There was no obvious reason, no change in traffic or movement of wireless devices, nothing we could see that was causing these drop outs. The software features are also simplified in a few places, compared to Netgear’s standalone routers. For some reason, band splitting isn’t allowed on the Orbi platform, so you’ll have to operate both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks under the same name. Parental controls are entirely absent: the manufacturer says it’s working on adding support for the Circle app, but it hasn’t committed to any time frame. And, inevitably with no way to connect external storage, you miss out on file-sharing functions. Still, the web portal itself is neater than the Nighthawk variant and the smartphone app works well as a central point of management for your distributed network.

The original Orbi WiFi 6 product was quite chunky, but the RBK353 is much smaller. In the box, you get one router and two satellites, although there’s a cheaper version with two satellites (the RBK352). Each device is a small box, with rounded edges (178 x 145 x 61mm). They’re easy enough to position where you want them. It’s a real shame that Circle, the parental control system, still hasn’t been enabled on any of the Orbi Wi-Fi 6 products, as it means that Netgear is losing some ground to its rivals. Without this option, you can only toggle the individual device’s internet access. As with all Orbi products, the RBK752 is set up and configured using the Orbi app. This walks you through placing the router and satellite and configuring a secure wireless network. As with practically all mesh systems, the RBK752 presents the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks under the same names, pushing clients to connect to the best network based on range, performance and features. With 50-feet separating the test machine from the router, the RBR750’s bandwidth dropped to 100.3Mbps. This is more than enough for most uses but was well behind the Eero Pro 6 (239.9Mbps), the Linksys Velop AX4200 (201.3Mbps) and the Netgear Orbi RBK852 (124.4Mbps). The units are positioned in what we’d call a typical home layout with one downstairs acting as the router and a second unit upstairs in a central location. We believe this is the most typical use case for a mesh networking product like this.

While the Wi-Fi specs are reduced, for clients, this system still has eight streams of Wi-Fi 6 split across two devices, which is powerful. If you buy the RBK753, which adds in an extra satellite, then you’ve got 12 streams.