Orbi (RBR750) mesh 3-pack value review, feedback

Overall first (and last) impressions from the Orbi RBR750 plus sats mesh system.

Base unit I think is in a 50 USD price range; dubious value for the price point. Compared contrasted with an ASUS RT-AC68U not quite double the cost. 

Pack included the 2x RBS350, I think it was, sat APs. For the price point, ~350 USD, maybe you are paying for the tri-band, and a "bargain" on the sat APs. MAYBE. But the router features just seemed a bit under-powered, to be honest; but to be fair, on the other hand, in the base unit price point, maybe apporpriately priced.

Router features, does most what I might want to do in a router, from what I could find, but we had difficulties configuring the Wifi mesh appropriately. One of the APs appeared to come up and sustain a connection; the other one kept dropping. To be fair, I do not know if the technician who did the original configuration performed the necessary steps on the B unit. That said...

Could not Wifi find ranges, coverages, etc, in any of the documentation, but one number jumped out during a ddg search, 3000 sq ft, something like that; so simple reverse engineering square root, estimated at best 50 ft range. We could not even achieve that, but like I said B unit may not have been fully configured properly. AP unit A appeared to come up and stay up however. However, the range, and our home situation, bit of a stretch to expect the AP to do well. 50 ft is pushing it, I think. Not sure N/g could do anything to improve that, to be fair; more a limitation of the wifi, bandwidths, etc. Also please do not interpret as wanting more power, higher bands, absolutely not; for many EMF, health reasons. Only to say, 50 open air at best; considering also structures, etc, reflections, etc.

I did get to network analyzing our wifi to determine could we adjust channels and such, however. And although there are more channels we could connect with, in theory, in either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz, there are very limited choices what we can do from the router config itself. VERY limited. Plus, apparently requires some backdoor putty (or other) telnet tricks to silence the 5 GHz radio; the web interfaces DOES NOT WORK, does not stay disabled. From one blog mention, apparently some sort of baked into the cake watchdog that always enables it, no matter what. Which makes it very difficult indeed, nigh unto impossible, troubleshooting either of the radios, channels, etc, for availability.

For admin access, so many units these days offer "app access", which is fine. I guess it is the nature of things being leashed to a cell phone. I do not personally care about that, and was simple enough to configure via desktop browser. Was easy enough to navigate basic from advanced feature sets; no more or less than competitors, and I actually found the relative simplicity of the features somewhat refreshing.

I did not get far enough into configuration before we decided to throw in the towel and return the unit to store of purchase, evaluating things like port forwarding, things of this nature. I see the features, in theory, were available, to what extent, did not explore them.

Overall impressions; if you just need a decent router, adequate configuration ability, will do fine. If you need to tune things, do more advanced things like (Adaptive) Quality of Service (QoS) config, you are out of luck, go with a more feature enabled brand.

HTH, evaluating this unit, versus maybe others in the same ~50-100 price range, for base units, etc.