General questions about RBK852 - possible first time buyer!

Here's my two cents...

I haven't really been following the NightHawk systems much, but my understanding is that the Orbi WiFi 6 systems are the top-of-th-line systems from Netgear.  Others may have a differing opinion.

I had the Orbi WiFi 5 system for a long time, but continually had a problem where throughput on the system would regularly drop to about 10% of normal until I rebooted the system.  This would happen after about three days of use.  After complaining here in the forum enough times, one of the moderators connected me to a support engineer (my 90 days of support had long ago expired) and they then started working with me to understand the issue.  After quite a few months, there was a firmware update released that finally took care of my issue.  Because I found the Orbi system to be undependable, I tried just about every other mesh system on the market, but none of them could achieve the overall throughput of the Orbi system.  They were generally half as fast and the best one was only about two-thirds as fast, so I kept coming back to the Orbi.

When I decided it was time to go to WiFi 6, I decided to go with the Orbi again because of the performance.  The firmware is at this point is very basic and has no extra features like parental controls or Netgear's security package, but I don't use any of those features, so they were not a concern for me.  So far, with the exception of the last firmware update, all has gone well and I have not experienced any issues with the Orbi AX system, so I'm a happy camper.  

I also had the opportunity to try the Linksys Velop WiFi 6 system and ran into bad hardware on the first set and horrible configuration/setup problems on the second one.  Once it was configured, it seemed stable and reliable, but the throughput was maybe 10% slower than the Orbi's.  Because of that as well as all of the issues I had getting them set up, I ended up returning the Velop system and will be sticking with the Orbi system.

As for my overall perception of the Orbi WiFi 6 system, I think it is a very good system and if it was built like the older Orbi systems, it will be the best performer for throughput on the market.  It is pricey, no doubt, but to me seems worth the extra cost for the consistent high performance.

Overall, I would recommend the Orbi AX system to anyone that is performance oriented.