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I purchased an Orbi Pro system for my law office and was surprised to discover that this $500 business-class device does not support WPA2-Enterprise, which has been supported by default on each of the many ~$100 consumer-grade wifi routers I have owned in the past ten years. I would request that Netgear consider implementation of this standard as an urgent priority for the next firmware update.
Thank you for your question. This feature has been brought up to engineering about the possibility of implementing this feature, be on the look out for future updates to the Orbi Pro platform.
Thank you for considering OrbiPro. OrbiPro is great “System in box – Router-Switch-AP all combined” that focuses of bringing some enterprise/campus wifi experience to prosumers users. We consider all feature requests and prioritize them in order.
As of today, Users can buy our strong and popular WAC5xx series to use features VLAN, WPA-Enterprise and Mesh (WDS links). With Insight(www.insight.netgear.com) + WAC540, Users get a dedicated wireless backhaul link similar to OrbiPro. WAC540 is Tri-Radio Access point. Insight provides features like OKC based fast roaming.
We promise to keep bringing innovations and new features to both Insight manager and standalone OrbiPros, WAC5xx series. at CES 2019, we annonced WAC124 (Desktop 802.11 AC Wave 2 4x4, WAC540- 802.11AC Wave2 Fully insight managed Tri-Band AC3000 AP, SRC60 - a beatiful wall/ceiling mount OrbiPro Satellite which own award in CES2019).
There are more hardware choices and software features coming out in our pipeline for this segment. Thanks again for choosing Netgear SMB wireless.
I only take exception to nmhTester's response insofar as most consumer grade wifi router/AP units have WPA2-Enterprise support, even at the $100 price point, as do netgear's business class products at much lower price points than the $500 Orbi Pro system (including WAC505, at $89 list). I have gotten the strong sense in reading these forums that Orbi Pro was understood within Netgear's engineering team as a project to bring Mesh and some other enterprise Wifi features to small businesses with non-technical managers and no IT staff. That's quite laudable as far as it goes -- as a small business owner, that describes most of my peers. At the same time, from a purchasing standpoint, it makes no sense to me that a 14-year-old standard that is included by default in virtually every device on the market would be left off at such a high price point, simply because the engineering team thought their target market wouldn't want or need or know what to do with it. As a buyer, I generally expect that if X and Y are similar devices for a similar purpose, but X costs 5 times what Y costs, X should do what Y does and then more. Now, to be perfectly honest, WPA2-Enterprise wasn't one of our requirements when we purchased the device, or I would have checked for it specifically before buying, but I was really quite surprised to find it not there when I needed it some months later. I'm sure it doesn't help that the way the Orbi Pro has been advertised does not reflect the same intent that I am now hearing about on these forums in terms of the target market.
I hope this will be easy to fix with a firmware patch, insofar as Netgear clearly has experience implementing WPA2-Enterprise on its devices.
Model: Orbi Pro Tri-band WiFi System (SRK60) AC3000
If you call a product enterprise and leave off a basic enterprise requirement... seems like a huge miss. Seems like someone took a consumer based analysis of the feature set usage and applied it to enteprise. Is this feature added yet? I'm in the same situation as people in the discussion. This solved a coverage issue when I didn't have the strict enterprise requirement and my business has grown and now I need it to manage access and meet standard security requirements such as SOC2.
Any hope of bringing WPA2-Enterprise to the entire Orbi product line ?
I agree with the OP on this, price point for Orbi was very high (given competitive products price points) and the lack of a basic feature that is available in MANY other lower end products really has me questioning my decision to buy into the Orbi, and certainly any future purcahses to extend my network.
