Question Netgear 770 for $799 or TPlink BE65 Pro for $399 ?

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whynotme

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Aug 20, 2019
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I bought a Netgear 770 system for $799 a few weeks ago and Best Buy now has the TPLink BE65 Pro on sale at $399 (normally $599). They are both BE11000 mesh systems and I'm just wondering if it's worth saving $400 to return the Netgear and buy the TPLink. Thoughts/preference for one vs the other in terms of performance?
 
cruisetung said:
Tell us why do you need a mesh router system that's so expensive?

4K stream videos from Youtube/Netflix only requires 30Mbps per person / device.
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Well, the why shouldn't matter. But I'll tell you anyhow. I have a bad case of electronics acquisition disorder where I love buying the latest and greatest electronics, having great specs, and knowing I can do 0-60 in 3 seconds even though I don't need to. Also, I have at least 50 wifi devices connected at any one time and I like having extra capacity. Also, square footage dictates a top mesh system.
 
Mesh is a marketing term for non technical people. It is really just another name for wifi repeater. The only difference is now they use proprietary methods of solving wifi requirement only a single device can use a single encrypted connection rather than WDS used by the old repeaters. This is mostly so they can lock you into only buying equipment from them.

Mesh still suffers the same issue the old repeater. Unless there are extra radio chips in the units purely for traffic between the units they share the bandwidth. This means the traffic is being sent twice which cuts the bandwidth in half....or even more if it goes multiple hops. There is no free lunch here. You either pay for extra dedicated backhaul radio chips or you exchange bandwidth for coverage distance.

The coverage numbers are very suspect on any of these. Just because it is wifi7 doesn't mean it goes farther, very technically when you use 320mhz radio bands you must transmit at slightly lower power due to regulations so it actually will go less. They are looking at the distance if you have multiple repeater hops in the path.

Without digging though all the details on which model do what I am not sure about the speeds. It appears they are assuming you can use the wifi7 feature that lets you bond 2.4,5, and 6 radio together. Maybe the router can do it but no end device exists that I know of. If these nic cards exist they are going to be very expensive. Rather than just a single radio that you can pick the band you now must have 3 chips one of each band since they run at the same time. No mobile platform like a cell phone will ever support it. The extra radio chips take more space and use more power. This feature is another one for the marketing guys to put big numbers on the box that nobody can actually get.

And then you have the so called seamless roaming. First and most important the end device not the network decides where it connects and when it changes. Next you will always get a very small interuption because the wifi session keys must be renogotiated when you change from one base to another. This is not a mesh feature it has been in use in busniess since the start of wifi. It "mostly" works but some end devices are really stupid. The concept of true seamless roaming is actually stupid. I can see the idiot falling down the stairs in his house because he is watching netflix on this phone......the idiots already walk out in front of cars.

As you can tell I really don't like "mesh" of any kind.

If you want better wifi coverage run ethernet cable between the main router and the remote rooms and place a second router in that room running at AP. This is the solution large business still uses, none use silly mesh systems.
 
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bill001g said:
Mesh is a marketing term for non technical people. It is really just another name for wifi repeater. The only difference is now they use proprietary methods of solving wifi requirement only a single device can use a single encrypted connection rather than WDS used by the old repeaters. This is mostly so they can lock you into only buying equipment from them.

Mesh still suffers the same issue the old repeater. Unless there are extra radio chips in the units purely for traffic between the units they share the bandwidth. This means the traffic is being sent twice which cuts the bandwidth in half....or even more if it goes multiple hops. There is no free lunch here. You either pay for extra dedicated backhaul radio chips or you exchange bandwidth for coverage distance.

The coverage numbers are very suspect on any of these. Just because it is wifi7 doesn't mean it goes farther, very technically when you use 320mhz radio bands you must transmit at slightly lower power due to regulations so it actually will go less. They are looking at the distance if you have multiple repeater hops in the path.

Without digging though all the details on which model do what I am not sure about the speeds. It appears they are assuming you can use the wifi7 feature that lets you bond 2.4,5, and 6 radio together. Maybe the router can do it but no end device exists that I know of. If these nic cards exist they are going to be very expensive. Rather than just a single radio that you can pick the band you now must have 3 chips one of each band since they run at the same time. No mobile platform like a cell phone will ever support it. The extra radio chips take more space and use more power. This feature is another one for the marketing guys to put big numbers on the box that nobody can actually get.

And then you have the so called seamless roaming. First and most important the end device not the network decides where it connects and when it changes. Next you will always get a very small interuption because the wifi session keys must be renogotiated when you change from one base to another. This is not a mesh feature it has been in use in busniess since the start of wifi. It "mostly" works but some end devices are really stupid. The concept of true seamless roaming is actually stupid. I can see the idiot falling down the stairs in his house because he is watching netflix on this phone......the idiots already walk out in front of cars.

As you can tell I really don't like "mesh" of any kind.

If you want better wifi coverage run ethernet cable between the main router and the remote rooms and place a second router in that room running at AP. This is the solution large business still uses, none use silly mesh systems.
Click to expand...
Ok, well, new mesh systems mostly do have a band dedicated to backhaul. Also, the roaming is so seamless videos don't miss a beat when switching. Wiring just isn't an option in my house and the roaming on the same SSID is worth it to me.
 
whynotme said:
Ok, well, new mesh systems mostly do have a band dedicated to backhaul. Also, the roaming is so seamless videos don't miss a beat when switching. Wiring just isn't an option in my house and the roaming on the same SSID is worth it to me.
Click to expand...
Again the roaming isn't a mesh concept it is part of basic wifi. It is the end device that is doing it some devices work better. Problem comes if you have too much overlapping signal it will stay connected to the previous signal because it has not got bad enough and the end device does not have a way to know there is another better radio source without scanning which also would cause a small interruption.

Even the older cheap repeater systems can do roaming. You are mostly paying extra for the word "MESH" on the box.

Read the fine print. A extra radio "band" is not enough. It needs a extra radio chip. So a so called tri band device is not enough it must be quad band. For optimum efficiency you need a 2.4g, a 5g and a 6g radio plus a extra radio that can run on any likely a second 6ghz to talk between the units. You would for the price mesh systems charge they all would have this extra chip, it is less than $50 and likley much less in bulk. Most I have read do not have the extra dedicated radio chip.
 
bill001g said:
Again the roaming isn't a mesh concept it is part of basic wifi. It is the end device that is doing it some devices work better. Problem comes if you have too much overlapping signal it will stay connected to the previous signal because it has not got bad enough and the end device does not have a way to know there is another better radio source without scanning which also would cause a small interruption.

Even the older cheap repeater systems can do roaming. You are mostly paying extra for the word "MESH" on the box.

Read the fine print. A extra radio "band" is not enough. It needs a extra radio chip. So a so called tri band device is not enough it must be quad band. For optimum efficiency you need a 2.4g, a 5g and a 6g radio plus a extra radio that can run on any likely a second 6ghz to talk between the units. You would for the price mesh systems charge they all would have this extra chip, it is less than $50 and likley much less in bulk. Most I have read do not have the extra dedicated radio chip.
Click to expand...
I get what you're saying. I'm just trying to figure out if the Netgear is worth double the price of the TP-Link. i can say with certainty that the Netgear 770 system I have now has dramatically improved my speeds, even on my wifi 6E and 6 devices. I consistently get over 700Mbps download and 1Gbps upload on my phone, anywhere in my house. With my previous 6E system from Linksys I barely managed 300/300 right next to the main router unit. I'm leaning towards returning the Netgear system and saving $400 by buying the TP-Link system since from everything else I've read they offer very similar performance.

Any thoughts on the privacy concerns about TP-Link devices? Lots of noise around it but no evidence that anything nefarious is happening.
 
The wifi itself is extremely secure. If you are really paranoid about it you run wpa3 instead of wpa2, only really if you are worried about the government and their supper computer connected van sitting in from of your house.

Router security is a different thing lately. Way to many people seem to think everything needs to be on the cloud or have some AI function. They also think they need some app on their phone to do it.

The best security is where the router admin can only be done from inside your house, and better yet only on ethernet. Now days with cloud garbage who knows where you data is. There are again some routers that can only be configured from the cloud. You would think people would have learned after cisco did that years ago when they owned linksys and got huge push back.
 
bill001g said:
The wifi itself is extremely secure. If you are really paranoid about it you run wpa3 instead of wpa2, only really if you are worried about the government and their supper computer connected van sitting in from of your house.

Router security is a different thing lately. Way to many people seem to think everything needs to be on the cloud or have some AI function. They also think they need some app on their phone to do it.

The best security is where the router admin can only be done from inside your house, and better yet only on ethernet. Now days with cloud garbage who knows where you data is. There are again some routers that can only be configured from the cloud. You would think people would have learned after cisco did that years ago when they owned linksys and got huge push back.
Click to expand...
Thank you! I appreciate your replies. I'm still torn between what to do. I would love to have $400 back but I've also always been a Netgear guy. Also, the Orbi is already installed and working basically fine, though my phone does seem to lose wifi connection periodically each day. It rejoins almost instantly, but it does pop up the "wifi disconnected" notification when it happens. Another small annoyance is that to switch routers, I have to call my ISP (Fidium fiber, formerly called Consolidated Communications) to register the mac address and serial number for it to pull an IP address. I know, not really a problem in the grand scheme of life, but a minor inconvenience, not a big deal I guess.
 
most routers allow you to override the mac address on the wan port.

Hard to say for sure. Used to be people updated tech data on device more. Not sure what happened. This site used to have almost every device in existence but either because it is now in russia less people update it or there is just a lack of interest. Now if you really want to know the router manufacture is required to have internal and external photos in the information the register with the FCC. You most times can read the chip numbers and figure out what wifi chipset they are using. You just need to find the FCCID for your device and dig around on the fcc site.

This one is for the tplink but i can find nothing on netgear. I strongly suspect they do use the same chips. There are really only 2 or 3 large wifi chip makers and everyone uses them. No router manufacture actually makes their own wifi chips. In fact almost none even write any of the software that runs inside the wifi chips that comes from the chipset vendor. They do write software for the router part which is where all the menus etc are but all the technical work done by the wifi chip comes from the chipset vendor so they all tend to be the same.

https://wikidevi.wi-cat.ru/TP-LINK_Deco_BE65_v2
 
So I got a little ambitious and dug up the fcc id for the netgear 770. If you read one of the test reports it has the product name in it so this is the correct ID.

https://fccid.io/PY323200598

Unfortunately it did not have what I was looking for. Maybe there is some other place that has the photos. Every time I looked before they always had photos that you could then download and process with image software and likely get the actual chip part numbers.

This is a example of what I commonly find. This is a older netgear router that I found by accident looking for the 770
https://fccid.io/PY315300320
 
Just an update that I've decided to keep the Netgear Orbi 770 system. Best Buy no longer has the TPLink BE65 at $399. It's now $449, and the Orbi has come down to $699, so BB did a price match for me and is refunding me $100, making my decision for me. It's been a great performer so far, and I regularly see test speeds of over 800Mbps up and down on every device I test in every location of my home.
 
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