Review on 📶 Renewed NETGEAR Orbi Whole Home Mesh WiFi System – 3 Pack Router RBK43-200NAR by Patrick Burton

I've been using the Netgear R7000 for over 4 years now. I really like the quality of Netgear routers, but I hate firmware instability. Each update of the R7000 gave me headache after headache. But once you identify a good firmware version and stick with it; This router is still a very good device and I'm really struggling to find a worthy replacement. That was until I recently updated my R7000 to the latest firmware. After that, my 5G signal strength went down and although I went back to the 1.5 year old firmware, the signal strength isn't the same anymore. I still have signal for most of my 3,700 square foot home, but data rates and signal strength are much lower than before (100+ Mbps vs <10 Mbps in different parts of the house). So I tried to find a better alternative than Netgear, but so far the few mesh Wi-Fi systems I've tried haven't been that great. So I decided to try Netgear RBK50. I was already aware of the firmware issues and found a way to disable automatic firmware updates (thanks to the Netgear community); So I figured it shouldn't be such a big deal. I spent most of today installing the RBK50. The initial setup took over 20 minutes, setting up the router and satellite, updating the firmware etc. Then I encountered the issue of the Skybell HD not working. It turns out that a lot of people had this problem after the latest firmware. Luckily someone posted a way to solve this problem and it worked for me too. Everything looked fine and I started testing the system by transferring some movies from my Plex server to the Nvidia Shield NAS. After about 15 minutes; The router and satellite began to reboot alternately. This went on for a while and I noticed the same symptoms others have complained about with the latest firmware. I kept restarting the router, satellite, and modem to see if that solved anything, but nothing improved. This is normal and exactly what I expected from Netgear's crappy firmware. So I downgraded the router and satellite to the previous version, which seems stable to most people in the Netgear community. In addition, the automatic firmware update via Telnet has been deactivated. But even after that, the router and the satellite restarted. I reconfigured and restarted everything for a while, and finally everything started to look stable. So far I've spent almost four hours setting it up. Everything looked better now and my internet speed was over 250Mbps throughout the house. Streaming 40GB HD movies was flawless across multiple devices. But I wanted to continue streaming some movies for a few hours to test the stability of the router. Today is a public holiday and I cannot afford internet on weekdays as I work from my home office. That's why I wanted to do all the tests today. After streaming movies for over an hour, all my devices lost their WiFi connection as the router rebooted itself. The satellite stopped responding even after the router was working normally again. By this point, I was already fed up with Orbi. It was the same as the R7000 that returned on firmware but still didn't have the stability it had before. I have to say it was a really great mesh network for the hour or so it was running. Good output speed; LAN bandwidth around 450 Mbit/s (test based on iperf and file copy), long range, etc. I was just hoping for a lot more stability than it could offer. And this is the story of how I decided never to buy a Netgear product again. Given the NG firmware issues I'm aware of, I've never had the courage to buy an Orbi with a one-year warranty. The refurbished Revain made it possible to buy it with a 4 year guarantee, which made a lot more sense than buying a new one.