NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.

Forum Discussion

VTBOY's avatar
VTBOY
Initiate
Jul 21, 2017
Solved

When will the next generation of RBK 50 be available to buy

Since it's already July 2017, I think the new RBK 50 might be coming soon, but I'm not sure. So I wanna ask if anyone knows the exact time when the new RBK 50 will release? Thank you very much!
  • captain_phaser's avatar
    Jul 21, 2017

    While it has been almost 1 year since the RBK50's release, announcing a new system now without properly addressing the issues current Orbi owners have could have negative consequences for Netgear. With the recently released RBK30/40 systems (March 2017), we were told that this diverted manpower from original Orbi owners. We are also seeing serious issues with those systems as well. Another release would send the message that the first generation Orbi products are on the backburner as the main Orbi dev team would be shifted to Orbi gen 2.

     

    It seems evident that the RBK50 was pushed out too early to compete with other whole home wifi systems. The various stability issues and the lack of a functional USB port as well as a guest network at launch point strongly to this. The Orbi was released as a beta product and has yet to stabilize almost 1 year after launch.

     

    At a minimum, I would hope that a firmware update is released to fix the serious issues current Orbi owners are having prior to announcing a new flagship Orbi product.