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Please add in a feature to disable SSID broadcast on the Orbi Tri-band RBR850. The stated reason of "you don't need it" is clearly contradicted by the number of people who have been asking for it, and I can't imagine it poses any sort of software/firmware design obstacle (the response is basically "we don't want to", rather than something with justification).
As many others have stated, it's security best practice to make it as difficult as possible for a malicious actor to gain access to your system; stopping SSID broadcast is similar to creating a dummy Administrator account on Windows - it may not stop a determined actor, but it will stop bots and random people from finding their attack vector as easily.
28 Comments
I bought RBK352 recently. I searchon community and web how to disable SSID, and know that this issue is long outstanding. I hope Netgear can get our voice and put this function back asap.
This should be done across the brand line and not specific to just any Orbi. I thought I would be able to do this when I purchased our RBR750 and satellites, but buyer beware !
Please add the option to hide SSID in the next firmware update.
Hide SSIDs isn't supported on MESH systems since they have to be seen by the satellites to work right. Also hiding SSIDs isn't really working. Hidden SSIDs can still be easily found with any wifi scanner.
That's odd - I was under the impression that MESH routers use hidden SSID networks to connect to satellites on the backhaul network. Maybe it's just Netgear that doesn't...?
They backhaul is synced to the RBR and RBS only. No user configurations are supported here. Still can be seen by a wifi scanner.
Since some IoT devices (think home automation, electric charging, etc) have a hard time dealing with connecting to networks that don't broadcast the SSID, I can see some marketing type making the decision to remove the control simply to avoid having calls and inquiries come in from users of those devices complaining they "can't connect to my Orbi". I am really disapointed that I can't hide my SSID if I want too.
This should be the your customer's chioice and this a istandard technology feature you have denied to your poteneial customer. There should be a checkbox for each bandwidth that allows SSID broadcasting. I agree with everyone's comments. If you'd like, leave it off by default, but let each user decide whether or not to enable it. More details about poe crafting calculator are available here. Although this is a first level of security, it's enough to keep my neighbors from being able to see my network and trying to connect.
I totally agree with previous comments - disabling SSID broadcast is a very basic function for using devices that only working on 2.4GHz. Please do consider people like us which using devices on 2.4GHz!
