NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System Review - Mid-Range Value

Introduction & Specification Details and Close-up

Mesh network systems can provide a massive boost to your home or office Wi-Fi systems, but typically, if you want the latest standards and the best speeds, you've got to pay a serious premium for the privilege.

The NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System isn't a premium-priced system, and that does bring with it some limitations in terms of coverage and speed, though that's got to be weighed against a lower-than-typical price for a three-node system. If your needs are more modest - and especially if you're in a smaller office or home environment and you want a mostly fuss-free system - it could be worth consideration.

Specifications & Close Up

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Design & Software

Design

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The NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System is a lower-cost mesh system available in 2 or 3 pack variants, with the core difference being the number of satellite nodes you get in each box. There's always one clearly marked router node in the 2 or 3 pack box, and you can buy additional satellites standalone if you fancy a little future expansion of your network.

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Unpacking the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System is a simple enough process. NETGEAR sent me the 3-node version. All three devices remove easily from the packaging, and outside a single Ethernet cable and the necessary regulatory paperwork, the only other box contains the power plugs and plug heads.

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A lot of plug heads in this case, because NETGEAR clearly takes the viewpoint that it would rather have one box version of the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System that it can sell anywhere on the planet. I do get that this means that if you did change countries and wanted to keep it, you'd be set up immediately, but for most of us, this is just wasteful plastic and shipping weight.

Each node in the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System is a moderately tall (203.7mm) tower that tapers towards the back, available in a rather striking (but hollow feeling) white plastic. That's a function of the pricing again, though I can see the appeal here in having thinner individual nodes, because it does make them easier to place in ways around your home that are less conspicuous. An all-white node is still going to stand out, but with only one primary display light, the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System does at least try to be slightly subtle.

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The router node identifies itself with a sticker at the top that you can remove, but you're never going to struggle to identify it after the fact, because it's the only node with two ports: one 2.5GbE Ethernet port and one 2.5GbE WAN port for your incoming internet connection. The satellite nodes, by comparison, have just a single 2.5GbE Ethernet port to hook up additional devices. Aside from a reset pinhole and sync button on each node, that's your lot in terms of physical design.

Installation

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The NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System relies on an app for installation; specifically, NETGEAR's Orbi app for iOS or Android. The app is free to download, but it does require you to register an email address to start configuring your new Orbi system.

That hurdle passed, the actual setup is a nice, simple affair for the most part; scan the QR code on the sticker on the primary router node, make sure you've plugged in your Internet connection through the WAN port at the rear, and you've mostly just got to sit back and let the Orbi app do its thing.

NETGEAR's estimation is that the whole process should take around 20 minutes, and that's not a bad estimate for most circumstances; the only issues I encountered were an initial reluctance for the system to recognize that I had a WAN Ethernet cable plugged in, but rescanning for it rectified that issue.

Satellite installation is similarly simple; if you've got the primary node set up, all you need to do is sort out your placement, plug them in, and let the system find the new nodes.

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For the purposes of review, I installed the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System in my home in the same places I've used for testing Wi-Fi gear for decades now, with the router node near my Internet connection - a 1Gbps NBN HFC connection on the Aussie Broadband network - and then satellite nodes in a mid-range location a room away and in my home office, where a hidden wall that used to be an external house wall often plays havoc with Wi-Fi signals. More on this shortly...

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It's clear that the key market for the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System is those who want a set-and-forget style experience, because the Orbi app that controls it only offers up the very basics of network configuration and security.

If you want more powerful features, you're going to have to log in via a web browser, at which point you're going to be faced with a much more old-school interface. I have this strong feeling that very few buyers of the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System bother with that step, which is fair enough. At least you do have some level of configuration for matters such as guest networks, IoT networks, and port forwarding, if that's important to you, and you can largely ignore it if it's not.

You also get inbuilt parental controls and network security features within both the Orbi app and web interface, but both of these are just as 30-day "trial" versions, with full access hidden behind a subscription for each.

These are fine if that's what you want, though you will have to factor in the additional monthly or annual cost to keep them up and running as part of the overall value equation here. I'm personally not a huge fan of the "bundled security app on routers" style approach, but tastes and needs can very much vary here.

Performance

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While it's sold as a Wi-Fi 7 capable system, one way that NETGEAR keeps the price of the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System low by mesh network standards is by limiting its overall capabilities. There's no support for 6GHz networks for a start, leaving this as a 2.4GHz/5GHz only system. It presents itself purely as a single hybrid Wi-Fi network with no evident way to split out distinct networks by connection band if you prefer that kind of approach.

While NETGEAR promotes it as being capable of "up to" 3.6Gbps throughput, that's a combination score of both its 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks; the kind of capacity that you might see across the whole network at theoretical peak load times, not a speed you're likely to see on a single device from this system at any time.

So how fast can it run, and how well?

As with any Wi-Fi test, there are inherent challenges in terms of network conditions and precise location of nodes that won't play quite the same way in different locations, so I very much kept to my standard testing protocol as described above, testing the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System with the primary router node near my NBN HFC NTD box and the satellites at mid-range and far range positions.

That far-range position is the "hard" mode for any Wi-Fi system, and I deliberately use it to see just how well (or poorly) a system will run without any kind of additional boosting. For the record, the home office is Ethernet-wired to the rest of the house to get past the exact Wi-Fi problem I'm describing here, but using that with the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System would defeat the purpose of testing its actual Wi-Fi chops.

The first testing stop was to measure its RSSI levels across all three locations, to see how well its wireless signal propagates.

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There's a predictable drop in signal quality as I move further from the primary node; this is nothing I haven't seen before in the same locations, though the figures for the far location did make me wonder just how well it might work, or indeed fail to work on a reliable basis.

In most cases, the key reason to install a mesh network system has slightly less to do with sharing local files and quite a lot more to do with sharing internet connectivity. My tests were done on an NBN HFC 1000/100 connection, but it wouldn't be accurate or fair to presume that such a connection was delivering those theoretical maximums 100% of the time.

To give proper context, I first tested speeds based on a wired Ethernet connection, in order to gauge the current actual network speeds. That way, I can express each tested figure as a percentage of the maximum at that time, which gives a better long-term comparative picture of what each system is capable of. At the time of testing, I was averaging out at 931.01Mbps down and 96.61Mbps up from my fixed connection, and I've used that as my baseline with Speedtest in each location to test how well it shared that connection, converting the actual speed scores into a percentage basis of the wired "maximum" at the time of testing. This allows me to more closely compare different systems, even if network speeds themselves vary over time.

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The drop between the close and mid-range levels isn't an entirely unexpected one, though I have seen better speed throughput from other systems in this situation. In the far location, I honestly struggled even to get these speeds, with the node frequently just dropping out entirely. To be fair to the network, even the web interface noted that its connection quality was "poor". There are often ways to optimally place nodes in a given location, but I continued with this precisely because it was a deliberately hard test.

The other aspect of any Wi-Fi system is its ability to share data within the network. To test this, I ran file copies to and from a wired-connected NAS for a 1.34GB video file to see how speeds varied at each connection point.

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You might notice that there isn't a figure for the far location in that table, and that's because I simply couldn't get the network to remain consistently viable for the length of time it took to copy that file. I do admit that this is a tough location for Wi-Fi signals to propagate, but this is still disappointing if you're looking for much wider network coverage, while also being (somewhat) a feature of the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System's price point.

Final Thoughts

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Would the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System suit my particular Wi-Fi needs?

No, not really, but that doesn't mean it's an automatic failure; that's much more a reflection of my own more challenging needs in this respect, which also provides a nicely tough crucible to test Wi-Fi equipment in. It's not for me, but there's definitely some appeal here for a slightly different use case.

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What this points the NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi 7 370 Dual Band Mesh System as being good for are smaller dwelling spaces or office environments where interference is at a lower level than in my test environment, especially if you'd prefer a simpler and substantially more managed Wi-Fi network system, or if you've got particular needs for parental controls and/or managed network security features.