Netgear Orbi 770 review: A speedy Wi-Fi 7 mesh at a competitive price

Netgear has just added the more affordable Orbi 770 to its lineup, following the release of its pricey flagship mesh router. The 770 offers many of the same benefits, with first-class performance for both wired and wireless clients and full support for Wi-Fi 7, including the new multi-band MLO feature.

A few months ago, I tested the aforementioned flagship: the Netgear Orbi 970. I found it a very impressive system, and welcomed its support for Wi-Fi 7 (also known as 802.11be), but the enormous price was hard to justify. The 770 model I’m reviewing here costs well under half the price of Netgear’s flagship 970 – will this make the Orbi 770 easier to recommend?

Even so, it’s still an expensive system compared to older Wi-Fi 6 meshes, and very few households really need this level of performance. If you’re ready to embrace Wi-Fi 7, then the Orbi 770 could well be your best option, but it’s still not a mainstream must-have.

Netgear Orbi 770 Wi-Fi 7 mesh review: What you need to know

The Orbi 770 is offered as either a two- or three-node mesh system. The two-node pack claims coverage of a floor area up to 420m2, which should be plenty for most British homes, while the third unit extends the area to 630m2.

The internal radios are decently specified: the 2.4GHz band goes up to a maximum speed of 688Mbits/sec, with the 5GHz and 6GHz radios claiming top speeds of 4.3Gbits/sec and 5.8Gbits/sec respectively, all via 2×2 MIMO. While these data rates are nowhere near the theoretical 40Gbits/sec maximum supported by the Wi-Fi 7 standard, in terms of what’s available to buy today they’re towards the upper end of the market.

To help make the most of the available bandwidth, the Orbi 770 supports the newly expanded 240MHz and 320MHz channel widths and, while there’s no dedicated backhaul radio, the system uses Wi-Fi 7’s MLO (multi-link operation) feature to allow both clients and mesh stations to send and receive data over the 5GHz and 6GHz channels simultaneously. That should mean less of a bandwidth squeeze when lots of devices want to communicate at once. You can also help keep your traffic flowing by connecting low-priority devices to the Orbi’s isolated 2.4GHz-only IoT (internet of things) network.

Wired connections are well-catered for, too. The primary router unit has a 2.5GbE WAN socket plus three 2.5GbE LAN connectors, and satellite units have two 2.5GbE connectors apiece. However you’re connecting, it’s hard to picture a home or small office needing anything more.

Netgear Orbi 770 Wi-Fi 7 mesh review: Price and competition

The Orbi 770 currently costs £650 for a twin-pack, or £900 for three units. As I’ve mentioned, not many people will need the triple-pack: indeed, I’d actively discourage you from buying three units unless you’re sure you need them, as having too many mesh stations too close together can hinder performance.

You can also buy further add-on satellites for £350, but the primary unit isn’t sold on its own; if you want a standalone router, you’ll have to go for one of Netgear’s Nighthawk units, or something from a different manufacturer.

While the Orbi 770 isn’t exactly cheap, it’s far more affordable than the other Wi-Fi 7 meshes we’ve seen so far. Netgear’s top-end Orbi 970 offers faster Wi-Fi, 10Gbits/sec Ethernet support and a year of Netgear’s Armor security platform included in the price – but it’s currently priced at £1,500 for two units or £2,200 for three.

The Orbi 770’s other direct competitor is the Amazon Eero Max 7. This is less of an all-singing, all-dancing system than the Orbi 970, but it still beat the Orbi 770 in our performance tests. Again though it costs a lot more, at £1,204 for two units, or £1,804 for three.

The Orbi 770 even undercuts Netgear’s previous top-shelf Wi-Fi 6E mesh, the Orbi RBKE963 – that system will still set you back £800 for two units, or £1,700 for three. A cheaper Wi-Fi 6E option is the TP-Link Deco XE200, but the saving isn’t huge – at current pricing you’ll pay £550 for the two-node package.

Keep in mind that all of these are high-end mesh packages. If you don’t need best-in-class performance, you can get the Mercusys Halo H80X for a knock-down price of £150. This simple Wi-Fi 6 platform can’t match the top speeds of the pricier contenders, but has more than enough performance for everyday streaming and video-call requirements, with impressively consistent whole-home coverage.

Netgear Orbi 770 Wi-Fi 7 mesh review: Design and features

The Orbi 770 units have a rounded geometric tower design, similar to that of the brooding black Nighthawk RS300 router (although, unlike the 970 stations, they’re only available in white). The Orbi units also differ from the RS300 in having no lights or buttons on the front of each unit, save for a multicoloured LED hidden at the base, which lights up if the router’s in an error state. Otherwise, the only way to tell the thing’s powered on and working is via a minuscule power LED at the rear.

At the back of each unit you’ll also find the Ethernet ports, a reset hole and a Sync button. The latter is only needed for add-on satellites, as the ones in a pack come pre-paired – so once you’ve situated and plugged in your Orbi stations you’ll never normally need to physically interact with them.

Instead, management is handled via either Netgear’s familiar web interface or the Orbi app. The former provides advanced controls for things such as port forwarding and address reservation, while the mobile app focuses more on everyday management tasks, such as checking who’s connected, temporarily enabling a guest network or monitoring the wireless signal strength. You can manually turn internet access on and off for kids’ devices from here, too, however if you want automatic time limits and app tracking you’ll need to pay £50 a year for a full Parental Controls subscription.

It’s a similar situation with network security. The Orbi 770 debuts a new security model that regularly updates its internal defences to block the latest online attacks without requiring a full firmware update. However, the full Netgear Armor security service, which includes vulnerability scanning, phishing protection, Bitdefender client security and so forth, costs an additional £85 a year, or £120 a year with unlimited VPN and ad-blocker features.

Aside from those optional components, there’s not much in the way of bonus features. For example, you can’t share files or media over the network, or configure a network-wide outbound VPN gateway.

Netgear Orbi 770 Wi-Fi 7 mesh review: Performance

Call me sad, but I was excited to test the real-world performance of the Orbi 770. It’s the first home networking system we’ve seen that comes with Wi-Fi 7’s new MLO feature fully implemented and enabled, and it’s also the first to come along since the recent Windows 11 24H2 update added mainstream Wi-Fi 7 support to the OS. In other words, this was my first opportunity to try out the official, prime-time 802.11be experience.

I did this in my usual way. First, I set up the primary Orbi station in the upstairs study at the front of my home, connected directly to my internet line, and placed the second unit at the far end of the adjoining bedroom.

I then carried my test laptop (equipped with a 2×2 Intel BE200 Wi-Fi 7 card) to various parts of my home, and measured transfer speeds when copying a set of 100MB files to and from an Asustor AS3304T NAS appliance. The NAS was connected to the primary Orbi station via 2.5GbE; for the laptop connection I used the Orbi’s default wireless settings, which gave me an aggregated MLO connection using Wi-Fi 7 across the 5GHz and 6GHz bands.

Here are the speeds I observed, in megabytes per second, along with previously obtained scores from other mesh systems for comparison:

On the whole the Orbi 770 performed admirably. Even though speeds dropped off in the kitchen, the two stations generally delivered very fast downloads in all areas of my home. To put the numbers into context, Disney+ recommends that you need just over 3MB/sec for 4K HDR streaming, while a Full HD Zoom call requires no more than 1MB/sec. Of course, the flipside of this is that, for most people, the Orbi 770 and Wi-Fi 7 are massively overspecified – the cheap Halo H80X will easily meet their demands over Wi-Fi 6.

It’s also clear that MLO doesn’t multiply up performance in the way one might have hoped. Even though the Orbi 970 and Eero systems were tested before MLO drivers and firmware were available, the Orbi 770 couldn’t match their recorded speeds.

Indeed, I’d have to say that I saw no significant performance benefit from MLO, with this mesh at least. When I repeated my tests using a 2021 HP Elite Dragonfly laptop, connected to the Orbi 770 using plain old Wi-Fi 6 on the 5GHz band, the download speeds I saw were within 5MB/sec of the above, in every location.

I also experimentally tried repeating my tests with a third Orbi station situated downstairs. As predicted, this reduced my overall performance, with download speeds in the living room plummeting from 79.7MB/sec to 35.1MB/sec. That’s because the laptop automatically connected to the nearest mesh unit when a direct connection to the primary station would have been faster.

Netgear Orbi 770 Wi-Fi 7 mesh review: Verdict

We’ve been advising would-be upgraders to hold off on Wi-Fi 7 until we’ve had a chance to properly try out MLO. Now it’s here, and frankly we can see why it hasn’t been a top priority for router and mesh manufacturers. The good news is that we’re no longer stuck in wait-and-see mode.

And in light of everything we’ve seen, the Orbi 770 gets a qualified thumbs-up. It’s not a smart buy for everyone, certainly not with the market as it currently stands: most homes will see little or no immediate benefit from the investment, versus a cheap Wi-Fi 6 mesh router.

However, while the Orbi 770 might not transform your home network on day one, it has enough bandwidth to handle your ever-growing menagerie of wireless devices for a long time to come. While MLO hasn’t done anything measurable for performance, it should make your network more robust and resistant to interference and obstacles – and multi-gigabit Ethernet on every port certainly isn’t to be sniffed at either.

In short, if you’re itching to upgrade your home or small office to Wi-Fi 7, and need greater coverage than a standalone router can provide, the Orbi 770 is the sanest choice we’ve seen. Though not the fastest mesh on the market, and relatively light on bundled features, it’s fast enough for almost anyone’s needs, reassuringly future-proof and, by Wi-Fi 7 standards, competitively priced.