Imagine a home where all your devices are seamlessly connected, regardless of how far you are from the router or how many walls are in your way. Whether you’re working from your home office, streaming the latest movie in your living room, or gaming in your man cave, the NETGEAR Orbi RBKE963 Mesh System makes this a reality. This impressive wireless system, with its high performance and expansive coverage, is designed to deliver ultra-fast, reliable, and secure internet connectivity throughout your entire property.
NETGEAR Orbi RBKE963 Mesh System
The NETGEAR Orbi RBKE963 Mesh System operates on the latest 802.11axe or . This is the latest WiFi technology that opens up a new 6GHz band, ensuring superior speeds and performance. With quad-band (4 bands) technology and a total rated throughput of up to 10.8 Gbps, it’s no surprise that the Orbi 960 offers the kind of speed that even the most demanding of internet users will find impressive.
With this system, you can enjoy high-speed internet for up to 200 devices simultaneously, from your latest WiFi 6E-ready laptops, phones, and tablets, to your smart home gadgets and IoT devices. Enabling you to connect your entire home and all its smart devices without the worry of running out of connections or bandwidth throughout the network.
What benefits do mesh networks have over a standard wireless router?
If you are unsure why you should upgrade your home network and embrace new technologies such as mesh networking, rather than using a standard wireless router provided by your broadband provider together with wireless extenders. A few examples and comparisons are listed below.
- Extended Coverage: Traditional wireless routers have a limited range. They can typically cover a certain radius around them, but beyond that, the signal strength weakens significantly, leading to areas of poor or no connectivity, often referred to as ‘dead zones’. Mesh networks overcome this problem by using multiple nodes to cover a larger area effectively. Each node acts like a small wireless router, extending the WiFi coverage.
- Seamless Roaming: With a traditional wireless router, as you move further away from the router, you might need to disconnect and reconnect to a stronger network manually. However, in a mesh network, you can move around your home or office without experiencing any drops in your WiFi connection. The system automatically hands over your device from one node to the next as you move around, ensuring a consistent and seamless internet connection.
- Increased Capacity: Mesh networks are better equipped to handle a large number of devices compared to a single router. This is particularly useful in a smart home environment, where there might be many devices connected to the network simultaneously.
- Ease of Management: Mesh systems often come with easy-to-use management software or apps, like the Orbi app in the case of the NETGEAR Orbi Mesh system. These apps allow you to manage your network, set up guest WiFi, monitor network usage and more, all from a simple user interface.
- Reliability: If a node in a mesh network fails, the network automatically reconfigures to transmit data via the remaining nodes, maintaining network availability. In contrast if a traditional router fails, it can result in a complete network outage.
- Adaptable: As your needs grow, you can simply add more nodes to extend the network’s coverage. This flexibility makes mesh networks an adaptable solution for growing homes or businesses.
Hardware
At the heart of the Orbi 960 is a powerful quad-core 2.2GHz processor, backed up by 512MB NAND Flash and 1GB RAM, ensuring a fluid and responsive network experience. It’s also equipped with a whopping twelve high-performance internal antennas, each complemented by high-power amplifiers. This patented antenna design ensures an exceptional WiFi coverage across an expansive area of up to 7,500 square feet, making it perfect for larger properties, including both front and back yards.
- Radio 1: IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ax 2.4GHz — 1024-QAM support
- Radio 2: IEEE 802.11a/n/ac/ax 5GHz — 1024-QAM support
- Radio 3: IEEE 802.11a/n/ac/ax 5GHz — 1024-QAM support
- Radio 4: IEEE 802.11a/n/ac/ax 6GHz — 1024-QAM support
For those looking for more than just wireless connectivity, the Orbi 960 doesn’t disappoint. Each node has multiple Ethernet ports – one 2.5Gbps Multi-Gigabit Ethernet LAN port and three Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports on the router. This makes it ideal for setting up wired connections in your home office or media room, where you might need a more reliable connection.
Setup instructions
What the difference between wireless extenders and mesh network?
- Functionality: A wireless extender works by receiving the Wi-Fi signal from your router and rebroadcasting it to areas where the Wi-Fi signal is weak or non-existent. This extends the range of your existing Wi-Fi network.
- Performance: While extenders can help increase coverage, they often come with a significant drawback: they usually halve the bandwidth available to devices connected to the extender because they use the same channel to receive and transmit data. This can result in slower Internet speeds.
- Setup and management: Extenders often create a separate network SSID, which means you may need to manually switch between the extender’s Wi-Fi network and your router’s network as you move around the house.
- Cost: Wi-Fi extenders are typically less expensive than mesh systems.
- Functionality: Mesh networks use multiple nodes or access points to create a “mesh” of Wi-Fi signals across a larger area. Unlike extenders, these nodes communicate with each other and provide a single network for seamless connection as you move around the coverage area.
- Performance: Mesh networks don’t suffer from the same bandwidth halving issue as extenders because they use separate channels for backhaul communication between nodes. This leads to better performance and faster Internet speeds.
- Setup and management: Mesh systems typically come with an easy-to-use app that allows for simple setup and management of your network. They provide a single network SSID, meaning your device will automatically connect to the strongest signal as you move around, offering a more seamless experience.
- Cost: Mesh networks are typically more expensive than extenders due to their advanced features and better performance.
Security and Control
The Orbi 960 isn’t just about providing you with blazing-fast WiFi. It’s also built with security and control in mind. It comes with NETGEAR Armor, an internet security solution powered by Bitdefender that offers real-time protection for all your connected devices against a wide range of threats, including hackers, password thieves, ransomware, and brute force attacks. You’ll enjoy peace of mind knowing that all your connected devices are secure, from your PC and phone to your smart TV and other IoT devices.
In addition, this system supports the latest WiFi security protocol, WPA3, further enhancing the safety of your network. And with standards-based WiFi security (802.11i, 128-bit AES encryption with PSK), your data will always be safe from prying eyes.
Parental controls
If you are interested in being able to control your family’s Internet activity you’ll be pleased to know that easy-to-use features are implemented into the Orbi 960 system allowing you to pause Internet connectivity during dinner times or certain times of the day. As well as create profiles for each family member allowing you to manage their online time individually. For more information on parental controls jump over to the official NETGEAR website.
User-friendly setup and management
One of the key selling points of the Orbi 960 is its user-friendly setup and management. Compatible with any internet service provider, the system can be up and running in a matter of minutes using the Orbi app. You can also easily create up to four separate networks to optimize overall network traffic, further enhancing the performance of your home network.
Mesh networks can provide superior coverage, better capacity for multiple devices, seamless roaming and greater reliability, making them a significant improvement over standard wireless routers, especially in larger homes or offices with many connected devices.
With the Orbi 960, you’re not only getting a high-performance home networking solution but also an array of additional benefits, such as 24/7 priority access to tech support with NETGEAR ProSupport, smart parental controls for managing your kids’ online time, and seamless compatibility with both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
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