The Question Worth Asking Before You Buy
Mesh Wi-Fi systems are no longer novel. They have become the default answer to “my router doesn’t reach the back bedroom”, which means the differentiators have shifted from raw coverage to how well a system handles the wonderfully unglamorous messiness of real households. That was the question I wanted answered with the Netgear Orbi 370 (RBE373) Wi-Fi 7 mesh system: not whether it could push signal through walls, because it can, but whether it behaves well in the awkward in-between moments that real-world setup tends to produce.
I initially tested the Orbi 370 RBE373 over two weeks, starting with the main router before completing the full three-node setup with both satellites paired. Then, somewhat inadvertently, it became a longer-term test: four months later, the Orbi is still in place as my main home network. That has been useful in its own right. First impressions tell you how a product behaves during setup, but a few months of daily use tells you whether it quietly gets on with the job once everyone stops paying attention.
Devices on the network included two laptops, three phones, a TCL Android TV, and a modest collection of smart home gear. The TCL TV turned out to be the most useful test instrument I had, which is both funny and mildly rude of it.
Design and Build: Towers That Don’t Announce Themselves
The Orbi units are tall, white, and quietly confident about it. They fit into a living room without demanding acknowledgement, which is genuinely useful for hardware that needs to live somewhere visible rather than be banished to the cable shame-corner. The build feels solid without being ostentatious: matte plastic, a stable footprint, and no sharp little edges waiting to punish you for moving things around during testing.
In the RBE373 kit, you get the main router, two satellites, three power adapters, an Ethernet cable, and the usual quick-start material. Nothing unexpected was missing. The port selection is modest, though worth spelling out: the router has one 2.5GbE WAN port and one 2.5GbE LAN port, while each satellite has a single 2.5GbE LAN port. That is enough for a straightforward home setup, but if you have multiple wired machines, a NAS, a work dock, or anything resembling a small home lab, you will be reaching for a switch quickly.
Setup and Installation: Easy If Done Correctly
Standard setup through the Orbi app is straightforward provided you complete it in one sitting. Pair the router, pair the satellites, let the app finish its onboarding sequence, and the system lands where it expects to land. Done. Sensible. Civilised enough.
The problem surfaces the moment you deviate from that script. I paused setup after getting the main router running. A reasonable thing to do if you are checking coverage before committing to satellite placement. The system promptly entered a state best described as “functionally working, officially broken”. The router was routing. Phones connected without issue. The TCL TV reported “limited connection” and refused to stream anything. The Orbi app, meanwhile, insisted the system was not set up at all.
That matters because this is not an absurd reviewer edge case. People do this. They plug in the main unit first, get the household back online, then deal with the satellites later when they have a moment and slightly more emotional bandwidth. Or, in my case, they want to test the difference between router-only coverage and the full mesh. Orbi did not enjoy this little act of curiosity.
Some mesh systems handle partial setup with more grace: a single-router mode, a warning that satellites are pending, or at least a stable management state. Orbi’s behaviour here makes it clear the product is designed around one onboarding path, and it handles deviation from that path poorly. Once the satellites were paired and the app declared the system complete, the TV behaviour resolved. Useful data point: the limitation was not the radio hardware. It was the system state.
So, bluntly: if you buy an Orbi mesh kit, complete the mesh setup before judging stability, compatibility, or app behaviour. Do not be like me and try to conduct a neat little staged coverage experiment unless you enjoy being gaslit by network hardware. Character-building, perhaps. Efficient, no.
Performance: Coverage, Speed and Wi-Fi 7 Capabilities
Once fully set up, the Orbi does what it is supposed to do, and does it well. Signal held consistently throughout my small single-storey home, through interior walls and around a kitchen that has a talent for bullying lesser routers. Coverage inside the main house was stable and unremarkable in the best possible way: devices connected, stayed connected, and stopped asking for attention.
That said, the coverage claim still needs sensible expectations attached. Netgear rates the three-pack for up to 360 square metres, but real homes do not behave like marketing floor plans. I was hoping for stronger coverage into the neighbourhood, or at least down my driveway. I did not even get full, reliable coverage into the garage. That is not a failure of the product so much as a reminder that walls, placement, construction materials, and general household nonsense still matter.
The Orbi 370 RBE373 is a Wi-Fi 7 system, but it sits at the restrained end of Wi-Fi 7 rather than the “let’s frighten the credit card” end. Netgear positions the RBE373 three-pack as BE3600 in the Australian listing, with up to 3.6Gbps of combined Wi-Fi speed. It is dual-band only, using 2.4GHz and 5GHz, with no 6GHz band. That distinction matters, because a lot of the Wi-Fi 7 excitement people hear about is tied to wider channels, cleaner spectrum, and higher-end tri-band or quad-band designs.
In practical terms, the Orbi 370 Series gives you some Wi-Fi 7 features and forward compatibility, but not the full no-compromise experience of Netgear’s higher-tier Orbi systems. It is better thought of as a mainstream Wi-Fi 7 mesh system, rather than a flagship-class implementation.
A second caveat: to actually use the Wi-Fi 7 capabilities, your client devices need to support Wi-Fi 7. Most phones, laptops, TVs, and smart home gear currently in homes are still Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6, or Wi-Fi 6E. In my testing, only one device qualified, an HP ZBook Ultra G1a, which is likely representative of plenty of households right now. If you buy the Orbi 370 Series today, most of your devices will probably still be running on older Wi-Fi standards. That does not make the upgrade pointless, but it does shift the value proposition from instant speed miracles to coverage, stability, and future headroom.
One trade-off worth understanding is how the Orbi units talk to each other. Mesh systems do not just connect your devices to Wi-Fi; the router and satellites also need their own behind-the-scenes link to pass traffic around the home. On higher-end systems, that link may get a separate wireless band all to itself. The RBE373 does not have that dedicated 6GHz link. It uses Netgear’s enhanced wireless backhaul over its dual-band setup instead, with the option of 2.5GbE wired backhaul if your home happens to have Ethernet exactly where you need it. Which, naturally, many homes do not, because walls and Ethernet points rarely consult each other.
In everyday use, this was not a problem. A 4K stream in a back room while someone else was on a video call elsewhere produced no drama. It does, however, set the ceiling lower than Netgear’s more expensive Orbi systems, particularly in larger homes or heavier multi-device households. Latency stayed low across the devices I tested once the system was running correctly. I did not find a condition where the mesh handoff between nodes became noticeable during normal use, which is exactly how mesh should feel: boring, competent, and not loudly inserting itself into your evening.
Device Compatibility: The TV Was the Canary
The TCL Android TV’s “limited connection” behaviour during the partial-setup phase is worth dwelling on because it illustrates the difference between a network that is passing traffic and a network that all devices accept as healthy. Phones connected and browsed without issue. The TV, less tolerant of network ambiguity than a phone, refused.
That distinction matters in a household full of mixed devices. Newer phones and laptops are often forgiving. Older Android devices, smart home hubs, printers, streaming sticks, and IoT creatures with strong opinions about network configuration may be far less charitable. The Orbi worked correctly once setup was complete, but that window of partial-setup weirdness is a problem for anyone who troubleshoots by process of elimination.
In review terms, the TV did me a favour. It exposed a state the phone politely ignored. Annoying at the time, useful in hindsight. Very on-brand for smart TVs, frankly.
App and Management: Better Than It Looks, Until You Need the Weird Stuff
The Orbi app is more capable than I initially expected. It handles setup, device management, network mapping, speed testing, firmware checks, security status, guest Wi-Fi, IoT Wi-Fi, and remote access through Anywhere Access. For most households, that will cover the majority of what people actually need to do after setup.
It also gives a clear view of the mesh once everything is working properly. The network map showed the main router and both satellites online, while the device list made it easy to see what was connected and identify common device types. That is the kind of visibility most users want from a mesh system: not a wall of acronyms, just enough information to know whether the network is behaving.
Where the experience still feels split is in the deeper configuration. The app is designed around guided consumer management, while the local web interface remains the place for more traditional router administration. That is not unusual, and it is probably the right split for many users, but it does mean the Orbi still feels like two products stitched together: a modern app for daily use, and a legacy router interface for the settings you only touch when something gets weird.
The bigger frustration came during the incomplete setup phase. While the main router was already routing traffic, the app still treated the system as unfinished, which limited how useful it was for diagnosis. I understand the likely intent: preventing users from configuring a half-finished system into a worse half-finished system. The practical effect, though, is that the app is least helpful during the exact phase where extra visibility would be most useful. Chicken-and-egg, and the chicken is mildly irritating.
Security, Services and the Subscription Services
Netgear includes the expected modern security fundamentals: WPA3 support, automatic firmware updates, separate main, guest and IoT networks, and VPN support. Those are not exciting features anymore, but they are important ones, and they belong in the baseline rather than being treated as luxury garnish.
Netgear Armor is also part of the ecosystem, powered by Bitdefender. As always with router security subscriptions, the question is not whether extra protection has value; it is how much value a particular household will get from it once the trial period ends. The Orbi 370 Series is still a capable mesh system without leaning on Armor as the reason to buy it, which is the right way around.
Long-Term Use and Reliability
The hardware runs quietly and cool under domestic loads. LEDs are visible but not aggressive, and after a few days they disappear into the mental category of “things in the room that are allowed to exist”. Thermal behaviour under sustained household use was unremarkable, which is the correct outcome for a device that is meant to sit there forever and not become a hobby.
The bigger quirk is philosophical: Orbi strongly assumes the system will be complete. I would not overstate that beyond what I tested, but the setup behaviour does not inspire much confidence in half-states. If you are the sort of person who likes to move nodes around, test them one by one, or temporarily remove hardware while diagnosing an issue, expect the software layer to be less charming than the radios.
Verdict: Should You Buy the Orbi 370 Series?
The Orbi 370 Series is genuinely good at the thing it is designed to do. Once fully commissioned, it provides stable whole-home coverage, straightforward day-to-day operation, and enough Wi-Fi 7 capability to make sense as a modern mainstream mesh upgrade. It is not a flagship Wi-Fi 7 monster, and it should not be judged as one. It is the more sensible version: less spectacular on paper, far more likely to land in actual homes.
The buyer who will be frustrated is the one who wants to stage setup, test incrementally, or troubleshoot by methodically isolating variables. Orbi’s software assumes you are going all-in from the start and makes partial states unpleasant to work in. The split management interface adds friction for anyone doing more than basic administration, and the limited port count will matter if your home network has already grown legs.
Would I keep using it? I have been. Four months since the setup saga, not a single restart, not a dropped device, not a reason to think about it at all. For a home network, that is the actual goal. The setup experience was a one-time cost. Slightly annoying, yes. Worth it in the end? Also yes.
The Netgear Orbi 370 Series comes in a 2-pack or 3-pack variant. The 2-pack is priced at A$457, and the 3-pack is RRP A$649. Amazon has a deal for the 3-pack bringing it down to A$499 at time of publishing.
DRN would like to thank Netgear for providing the Orbi 370 Series Wi-Fi 7 Mesh System for review.
