The Orbi RBK50 Wi-Fi system from NETGEAR is not a recent launch and is in fact over a year old now, having launched at an MSRP of $399.99. It got rave reviews at the time by being what was then possibly the best-performing mesh Wi-Fi system, and today, it has just gotten better with updates to features and a good price cut to make the deal sweeter. At $317, it is not a product for everyone, but it remains the benchmark for two-node systems even today, often outperforming triple-node systems as well. NETGEAR has continued to expand the Orbi family of products, including support for both indoor and outdoor areas now, so the vast majority of this review will be applicable to the family as a whole. The aesthetics and build quality in particular are a constant across all of these, as is the user-first approach in making things simple and yet complex if need be.

This is where things start to conflict, though. Arguably, NETGEAR genie is the best way to go about both setting up and monitoring the Orbi RBK50, but the user manual mentions the other approaches available. Between this mix of various portals and dashboards, and also redundancy galore in option sets and settings menus/pages within all of these, they really need to figure out what they want the customer to use and then work towards making that better. The Orbi app is a good place to start with the user experience being the best of the lot, so I would like to see more features added here sooner rather than later. The other complaint I have is the USB port, or lack thereof in applications for it. NETGEAR genie has support for a local media server, but not allowing the USB ports to accept an external hard drive is a faux paus here. Adding this would single handedly take the Orbi family of products to a whole new level, putting more eyes on the products, and doing so is a great opportunity for NETGEAR to further expand in the home networking market. The single year warranty isn't very reassuring, but for a mature platform as this, faults on the hardware side will be detected well within the year, or they have already been recognized/solved on the software end.

The NETGEAR Orbi RBK50 is directly competing in a market filled with mesh networking products that are a dime a dozen now and yet I really don't see anything that does tangibly better if all aspects are put together. The tri-band system also allows for future proofing for a few years to come at the very least, with support for a large number of connected devices in a world getting increasingly more connected and "smart" for just about everything. The dedicated backhaul is integral also to where you do not need to worry about whether you are connected to the router or the satellite, and NETGEAR has added in Ethernet backhaul support recently as well to complete that picture. As it is now, all I can say is that I will have a hard time letting this go while testing other routers/Wi-Fi systems as the Orbi RBK50 has given me over two months of flawless high performance.