Hi Netgear team,

I’ve recently purchased the Orbi 870 system, primarily due to its advertised support for 10Gbps WAN connections. I’m currently on a 10Gbps fibre plan and have the Orbi connected directly to the ONT using a certified Cat7 cable. The port negotiates at 10Gbps full duplex, and all hardware in the chain supports 10Gbps.

However, I’ve noticed that the internal speed test built into the Orbi consistently caps out at around 4.5Gbps, regardless of time of day or test server. I understand that the Orbi 870 only has 2.5Gbps LAN ports and that wireless speeds have their own limitations that’s expected. But since the test is run directly from the router, I had assumed it would be able to at least demonstrate close to full WAN throughput (e.g. 8–9Gbps), especially on such a fast connection.

My setup:

Orbi 870 Router (latest firmware)
10Gbps fibre connection
Cat7 cable from ONT to Orbi 870’s 10GbE WAN port
WAN port confirmed as 10Gbps full duplex
Internal speed test peaking at ~4.5Gbps consistently
Firewalla Pro removed from inline during testing
ISP speed tests from ONT are at advertised speed.

My questions:

Is the Orbi 870 hardware limited in terms of how much WAN throughput it can process internally?
Is there a CPU bottleneck or lack of hardware acceleration that prevents the internal speed test from reaching full 10Gbps?
Should users expect that the 10Gbps port is more of a marketing spec than an actual performance threshold?

Would appreciate any clarification from the Netgear team or other users who’ve tested this in a similar setup

Forum Discussion

Orbi 870 WAN performance