Shane
As Dr. Emmet Brown from Back to the Future would say, he needs ‘gigawatts’ of power, and that’s pretty much what the Netgear Orbi 860 Black Edition mesh has.
A modem and a router setup that is from the future, Netgear have packed a lot of tech in this two unit pack to have you and everyone in your home surfing and streaming like never before.
This two pack sees a modem and and an extender that is able to cover up to 560 square meters in and outside your home.
From your driveway through to the darkest corner of your backyard you’ll have a robust and reliable connection.
Whether you opt for wireless or connected you can.
The modem is equipped with a Quad-core 2.2GHz processor and both 512MB NAND Flash and 1GB RAM and is equipped your primary internet port with and additional four ethernet ports. The extender, or ‘Satellite’ has four ethernet ports.
Each port is capable of up to 1Gbps but this will of course depend on your receiving device’s network card with the main internet port on the modem being 10Gbps. Speed capabilities will of course depend on your ISP and the fibre line that comes in to your home.
Placing this in to the context of gaming, your console or PC should likely be able to download a sizeable game within minutes, not hours.
Trying this out, downloading EA’s Star Wars: Jedi Survivor which is over 100GB for PC usually takes an hour, usually two, before it’s good to go.
Cabled in to the extender that is wirelessly synced to the Orbi 860 modem Jedi Survivor download timeframe was way quicker, being ready to play in only 37 minutes.
Asides from chunky downloads, if you’re an online gamer you can say goodbye to network latency, hiccups and blips. It’s smooth and fast.
The Netgear Orbi 860 allows up to 100 in-home connected devices and aims to stream the connection at 100% to all. So everyone can stream, play and work uninterrupted.
100 devices seems a bit of an overkill, right? Well, no not really. If you have a smart home the number of smart devices vying for a connection increases exponentially and even if you don’t have smart gear automating your household, think of how many phones, tablets, connected TVs and computers / laptops that might be all queuing for a connection.
I remember when I first started kitting out my place as a ‘smart home’ and back then this was a relatively new concept. I was always experiencing devices fighting for IP Addresses from my modem. More often than not I’d have to restart my modem to renew IP Address leases. First world problems, yes, but super frustrating.
With the Orbi 860 you’ll never have this issue. If anything Netgear have future proofed.
Wireless speeds are up to 6Gbps and again this will depend on your receiving device. Distance from the mesh should not be a factor within your home. My laptop, which is multiband compatible was able to get a wireless speed average of 4 – 5 Gbps from the Orbi 860 mesh.
The Netgear Orbi 860 Black Edition is tri-band including Wi-Fi 6 of course and yep there’s an Orbi app.
This is super handy and you’re going to need it for setup anyway.
The Orbi 860 comes with defences by way of ‘Netgear Armor’ to protect your devices from any internet nasties. you can also use the app to see speeds, what’s connected, filter and more.
Last year I reviewed the RBKE963 Mesh System and this blew away all expectations of what a mesh system should be capable of. The Black Edition is very much the same and in my opinion more styley in its darker colour scheme.
But with all of this said, reliability, speeds and future proofing does come at a cost. The Netgear Orbi 860 Black Edition is not cheap.
If you’ve got the budget and hot speed interwebs in and around your entire domain is critical, the Netgear Orbi 860 Black Edition is a must.
