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 lineup of Wi-Fi 7 mesh routers. It’s pricey like the others, but at $1,299.99 for a three-pack, it’s a full thousand dollars cheaper than the next kit up, the quad-band Orbi 970.

Netgear says a three-pack of Orbi 870s can cover up to 9,000 square feet with Wi-Fi, though, as with all routers, that number depends heavily on both physical and wireless interference in your home as well as where you put the routers. The Orbi 870 supports 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz bands. You can connect to two of those 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 like watching download progress bars as much as I do (probably an unhealthy amount). But again, you’ll need Wi-Fi 7 on your phone or laptop to take advantage of it.

Finally, Netgear outfitted the primary gateway with a 10Gbps ethernet WAN port, while both it and its satellites have four 2.5Gbps ethernet LAN ports. That’s a bump from the two 2.5Gbps on the cheaper Orbi 770’s satellites or two 2.5Gbps and one 10Gbps port on those of the Orbi 970. All of the Wi-Fi 7 Orbis support wired backhaul and “enhanced” wireless backhaul, meaning they talk to each other using MLO, ideally offering more stability and throughput.

Wi-Fi 7 is still pretty new, so unless you’ve upgraded a lot of your devices recently, it’s hard to justify picking up spendy kits like the Orbi 870 — you need Wi-Fi 7 devices to use Wi-Fi 7 features. Still, they’re backward-compatible with older Wi-Fi standards and futureproof for years to come. And owners could benefit indirectly since the routers will communicate among themselves with all the stability, responsiveness, and throughput gains of Wi-Fi 7.

The Orbi 870 is available now in both 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 will happily sell you an add-on satellite for $549.99.