Netgear’s new Wi-Fi 7 Orbi mesh system is a solid bump with plenty of ports

Netgear just announced the Orbi 870, a new Wi-Fi 7 mesh system that joins its now three-tier line of Wi-Fi 7 mesh routers. It’s as expensive as the others, but at $ 1,299.99 for a pack of three, it’s a thousand dollars cheaper than the next kit up, the quad-band. Czech 970.

Netgear says a pack of three Orbi 870s can cover up to 9,000 square feet with Wi-Fi, although as with all routers, that number depends heavily on the physical and wireless interference in your home and also where to put the routers. The Orbi 870 supports 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz bands. You can connect to two of these bands simultaneously using Multi-Link Operation (MLO) with a Wi-Fi 7 device, which could mean faster downloads, less latency, and a more stable connection.

The Orbi 870 also supports 320MHz channel bandwidth, which will have the most obvious benefits if you enjoy staring at download progress bars as much as I do (probably an unhealthy amount). But again, you need Wi-Fi 7 on your phone or laptop to take advantage of it.

Finally, Netgear has equipped the primary gateway with a 10Gbps Ethernet WAN port, while it and its satellites have four 2.5Gbps Ethernet LAN ports. It is a bump from the two 2.5 Gbps on the Orbi 770 cheaperthe satellites or two 2.5Gbps and a 10Gbps port on those of the Orbis 970. All Wi-Fi 7 Orbis support wired backhaul and “enhanced” wireless backhaul, meaning that they talk to each other using MLO, ideally offering more stability and throughput.

Wi-Fi 7 is still fairly new, so unless you’ve upgraded a lot of your devices recently, it’s hard to justify getting expensive kits like the Orbi 870 – you’ll need Wi-Fi 7 devices to use them features Wi-Fi 7. However, they are backward compatible with older Wi-Fi standards and future-proof for years to come. And owners could benefit indirectly, since the routers communicate with each other with all the stability, response and throughput gains of Wi-Fi 7.

The Orbi 870 is available now in black and white. If you don’t want to shell out $1,299.99 for a three-pack, two are available for $999.99. Netgear doesn’t sell the gateway router by itself, but it will happily sell you an add-on satellite for $549.99.