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Forum Discussion
Mav1874
Apr 02, 2025Aspirant
RBRE960 Standalone - No 5Ghz-2
Afternoon folks, I've just bought a standalone RBRE960 Wifi 6E as I was looking for something with Quad Band and that could take more wifi clients, to upgrade from my RAX200. However I dont seem t...
FURRYe38
Apr 02, 2025Guru - Experienced User
Not with MESH systems. Orbi is a MESH system. RAX is a stand alone router which supports seperate SSIDs.
You can use the IoT network on Orbi systems for some seperate networks is all.
Mav1874
Apr 02, 2025Aspirant
So it is actually only a triband router as the quad band is completely locked out of use for the user and there is no way to separate the bands? Who thought that was a good idea, considering its open for other routers by Netgear, not something I even considered that they wouldnt allow me to choose which band my clients connect to. Seems completely disingenuous to sell it as a Standalone Quad Band Router. Back to the drawing board, or online shopping.
Thanks for the reply though.
- FURRYe38Apr 02, 2025Guru - Experienced User
Not with MESH systems. You can with stand alone routers.
Been like this for a long time. Nothing disingenuous about it. Orbi MESH is NOT a stand alone system. How MESH systems work. Again they differ from Stand alone routers.
If you need separate SSID networks, then keep with stand alone routers.
Orbi MESH offers separate IoT network for those devices only.
Good Luck.
- CrimpOnApr 02, 2025Guru - Experienced User
Mav1874 wrote:
So it is actually only a triband router as the quad band is completely locked out of use for the user and there is no way to separate the bands?
Sorry you were misled by the Marketing description of the product. There are in actual fact four separate radio bands. One of the 5G bands is used to support the mesh feature. (Conveniently buried on page 148 of the User Manual
https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/RBKE963/RBRE960_RBSE960_UM_EN.pdf
The first mesh WiFi systems were "dual band" (2.4G and 5G) and used the 5G band for both User devices and communication between nodes. Netgear's original Orbi was one of the first to feature a separate 5G WiFi channel to separate the inter-node communication from user device communication. To compete in the lower cost market, Netgear has offered "dual band" models.