Closer Look

The Orbi LBR20 4G LTE WiFi router comes wrapped in plastic, which keeps it pristine and free of dust out of the box. This is appreciated all the more once you hold it in hand, with the soft rubber finish and white color giving off an impression of a more premium product than what a typical router from yesteryear would be. Indeed, the Orbi family is designed knowing that they will typically be visible in the living room, and it looks better than the arachnid routers that are available alongside on the market today. The unit is also fairly large at 6.7" x 3.1" x 8.9", which means you can't hide it easily, and there are no protruding antennas for a cleaner look. The Orbi logo is present on the bottom of the front, and there is an LED at the top that lights up the diffuser plastic oval, which is blue in color. Build quality on the outside is really good, and the router feels solid to where it is not fragile and does not need to be babied.


Turning it over, we see four thick, large rubber pads on each unit, again in white, that lift the unit off the resting surface and prevent scratches. These pads also help uniformly distribute the weight of the router and stop it from easily toppling over. The certification label has the default login credentials used during setup, just in case you disposed of the plastic wrap already. There are vents here and on the side to help with ambient airflow in and out to keep the unit cool. Taking a closer look at the ports, we see a WAN port marked in yellow and for a connection from your modem, which also doubles up as a LAN port in 4G mode. A second 1 GbE LAN port alongside that will come in handy for when Wi-Fi will simply not do, and a sync/WPS button as well as the power port, of course. We don't see a network-connected USB port or even power/reset button! What we do get instead is a nano SIM slot for the 4G LTE connection, and everything is sandwiched between two external 4G antenna connectors, although NETGEAR does not provide the actual antenna in the box.


When connected to the wall and powered on, the integrated LED system is put to good use as a visual indication of where things are even before having conducted the setup. The manual, the relevant section is seen above, does a good job describing how the power and ring LEDs behave during various operational stages.


This is generally when I take things apart to go over what is inside; however, I also only do so if I am confident about it working after putting it back together since I do not like putting items through a destructive disassembly. Turns out, NETGEAR is using a scaled-down version of the RBK50 internals here, with fewer antennas but the same PCB design. The PCB is fairly small for the overall size of the unit, with the antennas on a side and the RF components alongside the processor (a quad-core running at 716 MHz), 512 MB of RAM, and 4 GB on onboard flash memory. A passive heatsink cools the components with the help of some ambient airflow through the vents seen above.