Answered Can Orbi replace my wired/wireless network?

Home plugs do not have to be on the same ring main. I use the home plugs linked below to get internet access to the far corner of my house, which is on a different ring main to where the sending home plug is connected to the router. From my own testing, the internet speed via the home plug is almost the same as if standing next to the router (both around 60mbps):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07349P1TX/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

As I understand it, there is nothing particularly special about an individual mesh node i.e. it cannot send a wi-fi signal anyfurther than a single good quality non-mesh wifi router. For example, if you are 50 feet from an Orbi node then the signal would be no netter than being 50 feet from a good wi-fi router. A mesh system of course had advantages in that the mesh units combine to provide a decent signal throughout a larger overall area.

I don't believe that anyone has ever said that a mesh system could match, let alone beat, a wired system. (Assuming that you have cable and switches that support 1Gb.)

If doing a speed test then try something like:
Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test
 
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@GadgetObsessed , I can only speak for my own experiences. Prior to a rewire my powerlines all performed fine and all three LEDs were green. After the rewire the signal LED is orange - always. The problem is most electricians don't know about networking and I tried and failed to find any that did. And the disruption in installing ethernet cabling is not something I would do except on a new build.

I proved that if you get close enough to the router then even my existing HH5 can deliver a signal quality close to wired. See earlier post. The tri-band wi-fi signal must be more robust than conventional routers otherwise what are you paying for? Again, I draw comparisons to my two weather transmitters - one cheap and one not. Same frequency, probably same strength but handled differently.

Reading reviews of the Orbi system it certainly keeps the signal stronger for longer distances than other routers. All tests were done on that website.
 
I don't know if this helps in any way, just connected to my sky router (bottom floor living room, front of house) wifi (usually disabled) to see the stats from my iMac (top floor office, rear of house).

IMG_1395.jpeg


And this is from the Orbi. - iMac connected automatically to the satellite

IMG_1394.jpeg


Both systems are running dual band with matched SSID's so the iMac automatically connected to the stronger signal (I'm happy to tray and force a 5Ghz connection to the Sky Q hub if you'd like)
 
Vince, many thanks for posting those images. My limited knowledge can only spot the Tx Rates which look impressive. But we have too many different bits of kit for it to be really useful.
 
Vince, many thanks for posting those images. My limited knowledge can only spot the Tx Rates which look impressive. But we have too many different bits of kit for it to be really useful.

No problem, if I force the sky Q hub to connect on 5Ghz, the Tx rate is 117Mbps
 
The tri-band wi-fi signal must be more robust than conventional routers otherwise what are you paying for?
The tri-band does not affect the signal from the Orbi to the wi-fi receiver unit e.g. laptop. Your laptop does not receive a triband signal from an Orbi.

Instead, Orbi uses the third band as a separate channel that is used for the Orbi routers to transmit to one another aka "backhaul". (This enables the Orbi nodes to communicate with one another at the same time as communicating with the device connected over wifi.)

Your BT Home Hub 5 is dual band - it offers both a 5ghz and a 2.4ghz signal to your laptop for example. Your laptop then connects on one of these. The Orbi provides the same 5ghz and a 2.4ghz signal choice to your laptop.

Suppose you are 50 feet from a wi-fi router and you get a signal of X strength/quality.
If you are 50 feet from an Orbi node you will still only get a signal of X strength/quality.
Orbi routers do not necessarilly have a better wifi transmission than any standard router. This assumes that you are comparing Orbi to a reasonably good quality router. If you have router with poor wifi (e.g. due to poor antenna) then any standard router could inprove upon it.

If you want to try an Orbi system why not buy it from Amazon and see if you find it useful. If you do not you can send it back within 30 days. I bought a 3 node Orbi 53 from Amazon together with a set of home plugs. In practice the home plugs alone covered the black spots in my house and I sent the much more expensive Orbi back without even having opened it.
 
No problem, if I force the sky Q hub to connect on 5Ghz, the Tx rate is 117Mbps
Can you confirm if Sky Q can connect to 5Ghz? I'm currently on 2.4 and don't want to reset everything to check other networks.

My TV can connect to 5Ghz and so can the Oppo UHD so that should ensure faster connections with less interference.

I'm guessing you have Virgin to get those speeds. Mine seems limited to around 66 but that's fine and when OpenReach extend fibre to my house rather than the box things should really improve.
 
@GadgetObsessed, many thanks for that info and advice. I did more digging and found what tri-band stood for. I have tried 5Ghz at home but the transfer rate when sending files from a laptop to my NAS box was dreadful compared to 2.4. I guess it doesn't like barriers.

If I have an Orbi satellite in my lounge around 9ft from the kit and in line of sight then that is going to give me (in theory) a far faster signal simply due to the shorter distance and it's surprising how quickly it drops off with my BT HH5.

Unless someone comes up with an alternative mesh system the Orbi does appear to be the best from the reviews I've read both on Amazon and independent sites. Every system has cons but the most common for this is price. If it does the business then price is soon forgotten. You only remember it when you're not happy and fortunately I do have the return option.
 
Orbi didn't work for me in a fairly small space, but in a busy area.

I bought the RBK53 set and it was beaten on both speed and range by my plethora of mismatched Wifi extenders hanging of an old Netgear router.

I fully intended to keep it if it worked even marginally better than my existing setup, but didn't feel at all guilty about returning it when it didn't. It is advertised as a new type of system that will improve throughput, so it if doesn't do that then they can't expect much else.

That said, I know people who have had excellent results with Orbi and Linksys Velop.
 
@daveb975 , many thanks for posting your experience with the Orbi. I think it just goes to show it can be something of a risk trying new kit. Everyone's house is different. Fingers crossed it works for me because in theory it ticks all the boxes.
 
Can you confirm if Sky Q can connect to 5Ghz? I'm currently on 2.4 and don't want to reset everything to check other networks.

My TV can connect to 5Ghz and so can the Oppo UHD so that should ensure faster connections with less interference.

I'm guessing you have Virgin to get those speeds. Mine seems limited to around 66 but that's fine and when OpenReach extend fibre to my house rather than the box things should really improve.

I believe the Sky Q boxes use 2.4Ghz to connect to a non Sky Q router to ensure compatibility, but if using a sky Q Hub/sky fibre Bb they connect via 5Ghz.
 
Thanks Vince. Bloody Sky eh? :(
Anyway, I've just changed some settings which may well mean I don't need the Orbi. What did I do you ask?

Many months ago I tried 5Ghz but that was with the HH5 in its old position close to a wall and the signal to the lounge was blocked by a chimney breast. With it now in the middle of the bedroom I thought I'd try 5Ghz again on the kit that accepts it - my TV and Oppo UHD player.

Did the Oppo first. The signal strength indicated 4 for the 2.4Ghz connection but only 3 for the 5Ghz one but after reading Mick's comments about strength versus quality (two very different things) I decided to persevere with 5Ghz. Connecting to my NAS box and viewing high quality JPGs certainly didn't seem slow and playing FLAC files was also without any noticeable delay.

I then tried the TV. Again, it showed signal strength of 88% with 2.4GHz and only 60% with 5Ghz but I ignored that. I loaded up YT on the TV and bu**er me - I'm now getting a connection speed of 50Kbps or more (earlier today it was 32Kbps). That's getting on for 56% faster! :thumbsup:

I'm so pleased I did this test. I know I'm still stuck on 2.4Ghz for Sky but maybe at some point in the future they'll allow those with 3rd party routers to use the 5Ghz band.

So thank you @mickevh , you may have just saved me a couple of hundred quid. :thumbsup:

I'm one happy bunny! Thanks to all for your comments and advice. :)
 
@mickevh, many thanks for that very informative reply. I'm sorry for 'polluting' the forum with my very basic understanding of wi-fi. :D

Not at all. I think you'll find you'll always get a sympathetic hearing from the "regulars" in this forum, so don't be afraid to ask any question no matter how "dumb" you might think it is.

The Orbi is a tri-band wi-fi system. Probably why it is more expensive than my existing HH5 which I guess is duel-band. In fact it sounds very similar to my wireless Davis VP2 weather console which receives a wireless signal from the station in the garden. It's a robust signal with 98% + signal quality. I previously had a cheap 'n cheerful Oregon Scientific system and the wireless signal would often be lost. The Davis kit was expensive but is nearly 10 years old and still working well. Money well spent!

Going back to the Orbi perhaps its tri-band wi-fi uses the same robust signal so strength stays high for longer distances. My cheap 'n cheerful BT HH5 seems to lose it quite quickly.

Let's step back a moment: All Wi-fi is availed by something called an "Access Point" (or AP, or WAP for short.) There's an AP built into a SOHO router along with all the other "get you on the Internet" stuff, but fundamentally an AP is an AP is an AP no matter what box it's built into.

So called "dual band" devices (routers and/or AP's) is like having two AP's built into a single box. One AP serves the 2.4GHz waveband, one AP serves the 5GHz (incidentally, concurrently.)

So called "Tri band" routers/AP simply take this idea one step further ans build three AP's into a single box, this time with one AP serving the 2.4GHz waveband and two AP's serving the 5Ghz (each tuned to a different radio frequency.) In the SOHO realm "mesh" systems the second 5GHz
AP is used for AP-to-AP conversation between the mesh nodes. Again this can happen concurrently with the AP-Client conversations which serves to mitigate the "only one thing at a time can transmit" air time competition.

"Tri band" is nothing to with improving the radio signal transmissions, it's generally to try and mitigate air-time competition between AP-AP conversations and Ap-Client conversations.

It is possible to turn off wi-fi on the HH5 and if I remove all Ethernet connections it reverts to modem status. I'll just need a cable to connect it to the Orbi for internet access. I can plug my gigabit switching box into a Orbi Ethernet port and that should give me the same single network as I have now for wired and wireless kit.

Not unless HH5 has a "Modem Mode" as discussed previously - if not, HH5 is still a router no matter how you cable it or whether you turn off it's Wi-Fi. In any case, if it's working well enough with your ISP (BT presumably) then there's no reason not to continue using the HH5 as a router and leave all the ethernet devices cables to it.

If you want the best out of Orbi, et al, you might turn off the Wi-Fi on the HH5 (because Orbi cannot "talk" to the HH5 to handle the roaming hand offs as well as it does between itself.) But again you don't have to. Ideally, you'd leave your HH5 to handle ISP and cable ethernet duties and "just" use Orbi as a mesh Wi-Fi system cabled downstream of your HH5. IN such as situation, Orbi doesn't need to do all the "get you on the Internet" stuff, so it would be worth looking to see if Orbi will let you turn that off and just run them as AP's.

Let's just pick apart this "mesh" idea and explore what it's about.

Ignoring mesh for the moment, in a large site we put up hundreds of AP's in a "cellular" coverage pattern of hotspots to both reduce the number of devices in each cell (thereby improving the air time contention) and to provide the geographical coverage. We then connect all the AP's together to a cabled network system. Essentially we get data off the radio waves and onto the wires as quickly as possible because the wires have much more capacity and reliability that Wi-Fi. I call the cabled infrastructure the "backhaul" llinks, though I'm not sure that's a widely used industry term.

For some far flung outpost, maybe we cannot get a cable out there. For example, one college I worked for, the gardeners were out in a shed in the middle of nowhere and running a cable out to them was impossible. In such a situation, we'd stick as AP in their shed, then use a Wi-Fi radio link for both the AP-Client link and a link to the AP in he "main" building nearest to their shed. The AP-AP link was often called a "mesh" link by the technology vendors. Essentially, in that locale we use Wi-Fi for "backhaul" link as well as servicing clients.

But that has a consequence for performance ("speed") as the backhaul and client conversations are competing for the same air time. Imagine message hopping main building to shed AP to client in shed - there's two "hops" over the radio link that cannot happen at the same time, so the message transmission (overall) takes twice as long, which manifests as less "speed."

With Tri-band AP's I can dedicate one of my 5GHz radios in my AP's exclusively to bachaul duties on a separate radio channel which eliminates the competition for air time between backhaul and client conversations and improves the "speed" (though not the link rates.)

....

Increasingly, domestic users are discovering that "one AP in the middle of the house" can't cut it, and need to make a "cellular" coverage pattern of multiple AP's and vendors are bringing forth products to address this need with a lot of automation built in to you don't have to do the "difficult" stuff, like plan the radio channel layout. Often they improve the "roaming" hand off's between cells also.

None of this is particularly new technology, it's just new to the SOHO realm. "Mesh" seems to be the buzzword that has been picked up as the way to sell all this as some shiny new thing.

Fundamentally, if you need to improve Wi-Fi coverage, you need to deploy multiple AP's in a cellular coverage pattern. The "trick" is how one establishes what I've called the "backhaul" links. "Proper" cabled ethernet is by far the best way to achieve backhaul. If that's impossible, then HomePlugs is probably next best. Failing that, it's also possible to use Wi-Fi to create the backhaul links, including using these "mesh" and "tri band" systems.

However, with Wi-Fi backhauls (however they are achieved) positioning of the nodes is important as the AP's need to be "in range" of a good signal from each other as well as the client devices.

None of this does anything to the radio "signals" - they are just as they have always been. "Mesh" and "Tri-band" offerings are not some silver bullet that magically makes the radio transmissions "better." What it's doing is allowing you to deploy additional AP's closer to where the clients are, then set up the backhauls for you automatically using radio links (instead of ethernet and HomePlugs.) By definition, if you deploy a new AP nearer to any given client, then said client will see transmissions from the AP as "better signal" - because it's closer by. Any additional AP would have done the same (whether it's called "mesh" "whole home" "airport" or anything else the marketeers think up.)
 
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@mickevh , what a brilliant post, thank you. I’m now much wiser about how mesh systems and APs in general work. Had I not thought to give 5Ghz one last bash I might have committed myself to a system I didn’t really need.

I live alone so there are no great demands on my network and a single AP in my HH5 is fine for 95% of my requirements. The only time it will not be up to it is when I’m downloading a UHD film off Sky and then decide I want to watch YT. I’ll just delay one until the other is done.

I’ve been a member of AVForums for many years but rarely visit this section. You are a credit to your profession sir. Thank you once again. :thumbsup:
 
Just to add an Orbi users experience.
Moving from HH6 about 3 months now

I recently changed to two Orbi RK50s, one acting as a satellite.
I have about 20-30 devices in the system including about 14 wired to a switch then to the Orbi.

I have 3 x 4k streaming devices via WiFi. And about 3 x 4k devices wired.

The Orbi has worked really really well in my house. Signal strength is full everywhere. And the speed is really really good also. The range goes to the bottom of my garden. Obviously speed falls a lot by then but got enough to still surf etc..

The satellite has ethernet ports that you can use if you want things wired. Use a switch and increase the ports.

Ultimately nothing beats a fully wired set up. But where this isn't possible I would highly recommend the Orbis. Since I've installed I've not had one single issue yet. Touch wood.

And being able to manage via an app is great. Simple and easy access. There is a more advanced Web portal too if you wanted.

And let's not forget the free Disney Circle software partnership. Great for a family with children to manage individual people or individual devices.

I personally recommend highly
 
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@dr no , thanks for your post. Clearly with so many devices to handle (and several people to satisfy) your existing HH6 wasn't viable. Being a single user my change to the 5Ghz band has made a significant difference and I no longer need to look at Orbi as a solution.

But for anyone considering alternatives I hope this thread is useful.
 
@RayP
In that case upgrade to the Smart Hub (HH6). It's a big upgrade to the HH5. Well worth doing.
 
@RayP
In that case upgrade to the Smart Hub (HH6). It's a big upgrade to the HH5. Well worth doing.
I enquired about that on my last renewal but they said I had to wait until 18 months had elapsed since my last renewal. Confused? I renewed when I paid my line rental which was separate to renewing my earlier broadband one.

I’ll qualify in a few months but when I asked about HH6 they said it would cost around £60 which I thought was a bit rich given I haven’t paid for previous ones.

How much better is it? And can it also handle 2.4Ghz band for Sky?
 
When I had the HH5 I replaced with Netgear Nighthawk X4S and an open reach modem as it wasn't coping well. But when I upgraded to HH6 I tried it for a while and felt it was pretty good. So I sold my Netgear router and stuck with HH6 for a year before too many devices meant I had to move to Virginmedia and the Orbi system

It's a bummer they want to charge you. Otherwise it's an absolute upgrade. Totally fine with both bands 2.4/5Hz
 
Thanks @dr no , when I go back to them in a few months I’ll firmly request one for no charge. I’ll offer them my old one in exchange. :D
 

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