Any review or test of Wi-Fi equipment has to provide a simple caveat before you start. Wireless transmission is subject to numerous and various interference factors, and the environment in which a review or test takes place can (and probably does) differ from your home or office. Unless you're one of my immediate family, but that's less likely, of course.
The point is that that what works well in one situation may struggle in another due to differences in scale, interference factors and even simple matters like the methods of construction used in one office or home or another.
All of our mesh reviews to date have been performed in my suburban Sydney home. That way there's a consistent metric for comparative purposes.
I've used my home not just because I live there, but also because I'm very familiar with its wireless network issues. I live in a moderately large home by Australian standards, but my home office is located in an extension to the original building. Between it and my home NBN connection point lies a hidden wall that at one point was the actual side of the house.
No, you haven't accidentally clicked through to the sealed section of Architecture Monthly. The issue with that wall is that it's very good at blocking standard Wi-Fi signals, turning my home office into something of a dead zone for signals to bounce around.
This creates a very good stress test for any router or mesh Wi-Fi system. Here the fact that the Netgear Orbi RBK13 ships with three nodes was a potential plus, because I've typically had to play careful placement games with systems that ship with only two. Having 3 nodes meant that I could place the Netgear Orbi RBK13's nodes in my usual positions for any mesh system, with one right next to my NBN modem-router, one in a mid point bedroom, and one in the far home office.
Predictably, the far home office node noticed it wasn't shifting signal very well, lighting up orange to let me know that it wasn't ideally placed. Had it been purple, it would have had no signal at all, but at least some shared node signal was getting through.
In terms of core throughput specifications, the Netgear Orbi RBK13 sits on the modest side. It's a dual-band AC2100 system theoretically capable of up to 400Mbps on the 2.4GHz band and up to 866Mbps on 5GHz. The Netgear Orbi RBK13 doesn't present itself as separate 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz networks, mind you, although it does allow for guest access if that's an important feature for you.
Testing the Netgear Orbi RBK13 involved the same standard suite of tests I've used for other mesh systems once it had time to bed itself in and apply all firmware updates. First, I measured RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) to check signal sharing and strength, from three different locations in my home. The near point was basically on top of the primary Orbi router for maximum throughput, with a mid-range point in a bedroom nearby, and then finally with a far point in my home office.
Here's how the Netgear Orbi RBK13 compared to a wide range of available extension and mesh products:
The Netgear Orbi RBK13 managed a fair job of signal propagation and sharing between nodes, which is what RSSI is measuring, no doubt helped by the fact that it's a 3-node system, where many of the listed systems only provide two nodes.
It's not just about signal strength though, but also throughput. To measure that, I ran Finder's Broadband Speed Test through an Aussie Broadband 250/25 HFC NBN connection.
That provides a significant challenge when it comes to comparison, however. Since my last mesh test, I've upgraded to a 250/25 HFC connection, where prior tests were either on a 100/40 HFC NBN connection, or before that on a 115/5-at-best Telstra HFC connection. Keeping it strictly to the NBN side of affairs, I had to average out based on the potential of each connection as a percentage to give some kind of comparative figure.
But even before I could do that, I had another issue to contend with. I've written about my experiences with NBN 250 here and as noted, at the time of writing my ISP is somewhat overprovisioning the link. What that means for me is that I tend to get speed test results downstream that are higher than the 250Mbps I'm paying for. If I used 250/down as my baseline, the Netgear Orbi RBK13 might appear to be offering over 100% performance!
To average that out, I first connected via ethernet to run speed tests in order to get a baseline to work from and created my percentages from that.
So with that level of exhausting explanation out of the way, how did the Netgear Orbi RBK13 compare?
Now, the data here does need a little context, because on the face of it, it looks like the Netgear Orbi RBK13's download throughput fell off a cliff when it came time to use it in my home office. Realistically it did relative to what the line should have been capable of, and certainly compared to the generally great throughput it gave the rest of my home.
Bear in mind, however, that that 5% figure is 5% of 272Mbps down, which was the measured maximum throughput at the time of testing. So the average was still just over 15Mbps down, which isn't blisteringly fast, but it's still enough to get by on for simple work. The Velop and D-Link mesh systems tested do manage to give more throughput in both percentage and real number terms, but they're also significantly more expensive than the Netgear.
