Orbi 970 Series

Go BE95. I have the main router and 2 satellites. Switched from Orbi 970. The BE 95’s have shown themselves to be much more reliable. 970’s weren’t worth the ridiculous price I paid.

The 970 system has been mostly fine for us, speeds and coverage as advertised. In a year or so we’ve had one major inexplicable no internet/unsync issue that mysteriously resolved itself. Being forced to use WPA3 for full wireless back haul speed rather than hybrid WPA2/3 makes some of our devices complain but that’s a tech limitation, not on Netgear. If you have the money to spend it’s a solid way to blast high speed wireless across a big house with a minimum of fuss and all the configurability most folks will ever need.

Have a 971 and 970 set up in my house 3400~/sqft. After the most recent firmware update, it’s been pretty damn stable. 50iah devices across tv’s, laptops, pc’s, game systems, iot devices, cameras. It did take some time to find the right placement for the satellite, and go through the firmware updates. Trial and error is frustrating but when it’s humming, it’s great. Hell I can get to my neighbors house a hundred feet away and still connect.

Have a 971 and 970 set up in my house 3400~/sqft. After the most recent firmware update, it’s been pretty damn stable. 50iah devices across tv’s, laptops, pc’s, game systems, iot devices, cameras. It did take some time to find the right placement for the satellite, and go through the firmware updates. Trial and error is frustrating but when it’s humming, it’s great. Hell I can get to my neighbors house a hundred feet away and still connect.

Orbi’s main network doesn’t handle 5GHz WPA3 and 6GHz WPA3 cleanly. **Solution →** Set the main network to pure WPA3, and split IoT devices onto a separate SSID (WPA2 only). If all devices support 6GHz → putting them on the main network is fine. But if you have IoT devices without 6GHz → they must go on the IoT SSID. Simply put: Orbi’s handling of 5GHz WPA3 + 6GHz WPA3 is messy, so if you don’t have 6GHz devices, you’ll run into problems. Even today, with MacBooks running Apple Silicon (M‑series) and Orbi updated to the latest firmware, the same issues remain: massive DHCP request storms are still unresolved. This brand gets criticized by many users for good reason. Its handling of mDNS on the main network is clearly broken, with no user‑configurable options. Automatic band steering introduces endless problems, which is why HomeKit devices consistently run into issues!! The Orbi 970 series has the same issues.！！！

We’ve had the 970 for a couple of weeks, we’ve got an old house with very thick solid walls and three floors and have never had any WiFi at either end before, I’ve been using data on my phone in my bedroom even though we’ve had extenders. Finally decided to bite the bullet and pay up, I’ve got the router and two satellites and I get 11-1200 GBit on my iPhone everywhere, 8-900 MB in the garden. I am not a tech person, I wanted something ridiculously easy to set up, this was, I didn’t want to be able to play about with settings, it has also been easy to set up the IOT, it was just there - 8 know very technical -, some things automatically moved across others we’ve had to reset (the Sonos speakers in the kitchen for example which I had to put back to factory settings, but now work perfectly again.) so two weeks in we love it, although yes it cost an arm and a leg (I did get a good discount though). I’m happy, I don’t want to touch it again for many years so hopefully this will last.