Just a quick note to say that I have made the switch from Eero and I'm blown away by the performance that I'm getting with Orbi. I really wanted Eero to work and I had sunk a fair amount of money into it with 6 eeros spread across my house but it just didn't fully satisfy me as I was having difficulty accepting the fact that I was loosing significant bandwidth in large areas of my house.
I've got a somewhat difficult situation for my wifi setup due to the layout of my house and where we have the main router/connection. It's in our media room which is above a three car attached garage but the signal has to pass through brick to get to portions of the rest of the house and this has been a killer for most scenarios. I've tried a traditional router/extender setup and while it worked I was loosing significant speed with this setup. I tried Eero and it was much better than the router/extender setup but I was still loosing a lot of speed after the first hop from the main router to the first Eero.
For reference - my house is roughly 4,500 square feet and I have Time Warner 300/20 service. In the same room with my primary Eero I was getting around 220Mbps while on my hardwired computer connecting I was getting 300+Mbps. So right off the bat I wasn't getting the full speed that I was expecting and this is sitting 10 feet from the router. On the first hop from the main router I was getting 150Mbs at best but usually 100-110Mbs right next the the router. After that I was getting a steady 60-75Mbps everywhere else. It was killing me that I was loosing so much speed throughout the house. I know for practical purposes that it doesn't really matter but... if there are ways to get full bandwidth then why not? In comes Orbi.
Part of me just figured I'd stick with Eero since I had so much money invested in it and, like I said above, it was still fast enough for nearly every purpose. I also doubted whether Orbi would have enough range with just TWO units to cover my entire house with full speed, especially given some of the challenges of my environment. Then part of me wanted to wait for Google Wifi to come out but I'm just not very patient so... Finally, I said screw it - I'll pick up an Orbi set of two from Best Buy and try it out. If it doesn't work then I'll just return it and keep my Eero.
I will not be going back to Eero and I don't care about Google Wifi anymore because Orbi has given me EXACTLY what I was looking for. In fact I just rounded up all my Eeros today and will try to sell them.
Orbi has blown me away. I'm now literally getting 250+ in every corner of the house and in the main areas I'm easily getting ~300Mbps. Setup was easy and I love the familiar web interface for the router. Yea, it's a little slow but it works and all the normal features are there.
In my opinion - Orbi is a "fire and forget" system. Plug it in, set it up, problem solved. Permanently.
Well done Netgear!! I think you guys have a game changer on your hands!! Everyone without CAT6 cabling in their house needs this system.
