Closer Look

Both the Orbi RBR50 router and RBS50 satellite unit come wrapped in plastic, which helps keep them pristine and free of dust out of the box. This is appreciated all the more once you hold them in your hands, 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, these newer Wi-Fi systems are designed knowing that at least one will be visible in the living room, and I have no problems displaying a satellite (or router, depending on the devices being connected to) in my own living room. These two units are also fairly large at 6.4" x 3.1" x 8.0", which means you can't hide them easily, and there are no protruding antennas here, so they don't look like a mecha-spider either.

The Orbi logo is present on the bottom of the front on each unit, and visually, the two look quite similar. There is an LED light at the top that lights up the diffuser plastic oval, which is blue in color on the router and white on the satellite. Other ways to easily distinguish the two is via the plastic wraps they come in, which mark the two and also have the default login credentials that will be used during setup. On the back is another visual difference, with a WAN port on the router marked in yellow. Build quality on the outside is really good, and both units feel solid to where they are not fragile and do not need to be babied.


Turning them over, we see four thick and 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 each unit and stop them from easily toppling over as well. The certification labels also have 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 of the units to keep them cool. Taking a closer look at the ports, we saw the WAN port already on the router unit, marked in yellow and for a connection from your modem. There are three 1 GbE LAN ports alongside that will come in handy for when Wi-Fi will simply not do, as well as a sync/WPS button, USB 2.0 port, which can unfortunately only be used for a USB printer but not network storage, a power and reset button and, of course, the power port. The satellite unit is nearly exactly the same, but has an extra LAN port in lieu of the aforementioned WAN port. As such, positioning the satellite where you may have need for more LAN ports will also be a factor—say, in an office for computers/printers or the living room for a HTPC, console, smart TV, etc.


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 thought about this and decided to proudly talk about the internals right on their product page, so this is definitely appreciated, and the images above are taken from the product page. We see what appear to be three LEDs, and multicolor ones at that, that help light up the oval ring at the top as a visual status indicator for the two units. The PCB is fairly small for the overall size of the units, 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 via the vents seen above.