[Music]
Hi guys! Welcome to switched-on Network, I'm @paulfp and I'm here at the home of my good
friends Laura and John who have some terrible Wi-Fi issues and in this video we're going
to do a home Wi-Fi makeover to - hopefully - take their home Wi-Fi from awful to awesome
with the Netgear Orbi. So, let's come inside!
[Logo / Stinger]
This video is made possible by the good folk at Skillshare. They're giving away two free
months of unlimited access to online classes and courses in design business technology
and more. I'll tell you more later in the video, or you can click the link in the video
description right now!
So here we are in John's kitchen, this is my friend John, so, John - what's up with
your Wi-Fi, what's the problem what’re you hoping we're gonna be able to do?
[John:] Our Wi-Fi drops out frequently with the signal and Laura likes to stream exercise
DVDs and videos and mid-point through her sessions there’s always an outcry [Laura:
argh! C’mon!] as the streamings pauses all stops and she has to restart her exercise.
[Paul:] Yeah, and that's not good! And what's your internet connection to your house like?
You've got good internet haven't you, is it just the WiFi that’s bad?
[John:] Yeah, no, so the the provider’s good we're with Virgin Media and there's no
problems we’ve complained to them and they say there are no faults with the delivery
it is the Wi-Fi throughout the house.
[Paul:] So Laura and John hear their provider’s Virgin Media and they're on the 50 megabit
a second package, but what speeds are you actually getting around your house on Wi-Fi,
John?
[John:] Throughout the house the signal speed fluctuates quite, um, significantly in this
kitchen area, in the living room we generally get full speed but upstairs in the guest room
and more so inJessica's bedroom, the signal drops down completely and to virtually non-existent.
[Paul:] Oh right, so it's really really poor then!
[John:] Yes well it's just not there, so it's non-existent! So we tend to if it's the mobile
phones we use the provider that we’re with.
[Paul:] So they're just ending up switching over to their, their 4G package and not using
the Wi-Fi at all which is crazy when you consider that got a good high-speed internet connection
to the house! Well what I've brought for you today John it's the Netgear Orbi. This is
a whole home Wi-Fi system... now if you're subscribed to Switched On Network you'll have
already seen my full review of this if you've not watched that already if you click the
I just in the corner up there you'll be able to see my full review of the Netgear Orbi.
Now what this is, it's a Wi-Fi mesh system that's a bit different from having Wi-Fi extenders
and without getting into too much detail the reason it's different is because this has
a dedicated high-speed wireless link from the satellite which’ll be going upstairs
back to your router which shall be in your living room so rather than it just trying
to take an existing signal and amplify out and resend it which uses up half of the Wi-Fi
for talking back to your router this is actually a completely different way of working that
and it actually has a “wireless wire”, if you like, between the two, talking.
Another advantage of using a mesh system like this is you'll just have one Wi-Fi name around
the whole house even though you've got two different access points and you can even add
additional access points around the house or in the garden if you want to as well. And
another advantage is it merges in your 5GHz and your 2.4GHz networks, obviously your 5GHz
network is better for speed but it doesn't go as far, whereas your 2.4GHz network is
better for distance but isn't as fast. With this, it'll just decide which is the best
of your devices to connect to, so, errr...
[John:] Sounds great!
[Paul:] Yeah let's get this set up!
[John:] Sorted!
[Music]
So this is the Orbi set that we're going to be installing in Laura and John's house, so
this is your router, you can tell which is the router because it's blue on the top there
and it's also got a yellow port on there which is what is gonna plug into his modem. So this
is gonna go downstairs and replace his current router which will just be used as a modem
and this is what's gonna go upstairs so they'll talk to each other wirelessly and hopefully
provide full strength full speed Wi-Fi all over the house!
So before we get started unpacking and setting up the Netgear Orbi we're going to do a quick
before test to have a look at the speeds around the house before we get it all installed,
so we can do a nice “before and after”. I'm here in the kitchen/diner where Laura’s
streaming Studios Sweat On Demand on her bike there, and we're just going to do a test to
see what speed we're getting... so remember the speed of the Internet to the house is
50 megabits a second so let's see how much of that we get... just going to do a speed
test here...
[Music]
So they were getting 2.29 megabits a second down here when they're on a 50meg package
which is obviously terrible so let's go and have a look in the rest of the house and see
what speeds they're getting
[Music]
So here we are in the living room right next to the Wi-Fi router let's see what sort of
speeds we're getting in here
[Music]
Only thirteen... thirteen point two down even when we’re stood right by the router which
is terrible! Upstairs in the kids bedroom now, speeds we're getting in here... it's
not even connecting... struggling to even get us anything here... error! Try once more?
have a look in the master bedroom. In the master bedroom, so if you want to use your
phone in bed at night, or if you want to stream something on the telly in here, how we looking?
So here we're directly above the router so you’d expect to get a better speed, and
we're getting hmm, about 15 ish? maybe... up to nearly 20 so that might be good enough
for some things to work but especially when other family members start using it, that's
gonna go down pretty quickly! Last of all we'll check in the guest bedroom. So here
in the guest bedroom, absolutely no Wi-Fi at all, it's just not even connecting... nothing
at all!
So I think we can definitely say that this house’s Wi-Fi is awful, let's go and try
and turn it to awesome with the Netgear Orbi! Let's go downstairs and get started!
So the Wi-Fi router’s behind the telly here, so we're going to move the telly out the way
to get started.
[Music]
So depending on the router that you have from your service provider, you might be able to
set it to “modem only mode”. The service provider here is Virgin Media and you can
do that on these routers so that it becomes just a modem and all of the router and Wi-Fi
facilities are turned off, because that's going to be being done by the Orbi. So on
your laptop, the address you'll go to is normally 192.168.0.1 or it might be .1.1; check your
router for more details! Now if you’re asked for a password to log into your router that's
normally gonna be on the back or on the bottom... in this case it's on the bottom here, so I'll
pop that password in... Obviously this will be different depending on what router you've
got, but you need to look for something along the lines of “modem mode” or “modem-only
mode”. On this one here it's just, there modem mode, and I'm just gonna select enable
modem mode, apply changes on there. So that's going to reboot the router and it's going
to become just a modem, not a modem and Wi-Fi router in one. Now that we’re in modem only
mode we can unplug all of the other cables... from the modem. Now generally speaking it
will just be one of these which will be active now and all the others will be inactive on
this one it's the bottom one number 4 which is going to stay active the top three won't
be in use at all anymore so that's where we going to connect our Orbi.
So the next thing to do, is let's go and get the the Orbi router and start to get it configured!
They give you one ethernet cable in the box... this is going to connect your modem - which
is just a modem now - into the router.
[Music]
Your modem connects into the yellow port on the router that's labeled Internet. Then let's
get the power plugged in. So we're going to install the Orbi app let's go to the Play
Store search for Orbi.
So I open up the Orbi app, say yes to all the permissions, tap on get started. I have
to create a Netgear account... okay on this screen we've got “do you need to install
a new router?” Yes... so that will take us to the setup. Now it's dead easy to do
we can just scan that QR code that's on the top of the router there... allow it to use
the camera on your phone and it’s literally just place that on there - success - it's
saying to unplug the internet modem, yeah we've done all that... “Connect your Orbi”
already done that!
So the next thing is to position the satellite, that's going to go upstairs, so we're going
to get an install that now. So in terms of placement of your satellite you want it close
enough to your main router so that they can talk to each other but you also want it in
nice and centrally so that all parts of upstairs can get a good strong Wi-Fi signal. Here,
the first place we're going to try it is up on this bookshelf here, so let's move that
out the way
[Music]
So here we've got the satellite all plugged in and set up and you'll see the light starts
to flash on top to show that it's powering up and looking for the router downstairs.
So once we've positioned the satellite press next in the app and then the app’s just
going to look for the satellite. “Orbi network detected”, it's detected the cables are
all connected, it's detected the Internet's there, it's found the satellite.
So now it's essentially all set up and Orbi is all active but the next thing we're gonna
do is just personalise those settings because you don't want to obviously use the default
username and password for your Wi-Fi! So if you press next on here... so we'll set our
own Wi-Fi network name and password and continue on there... go next... so after a while all
of your setup and firmware updates and everything are done: “update successful”, tap on
next... And your Orbi is now configured!
So now that the Orbi is all set up and configured it's time to go and do the speed tests around
the house to see how much of a difference it's made! Before we do that though I want
to give a very quick shout-out to this video’s sponsor Skillshare. Skillshare is like an
online learning platform a bit like a “Netflix for education” and you can watch countless
hours of tutorials and classes and courses on a whole range of topics covering anything
from technology, video production, photography, right to any other subject you want. So if
you want to learn a bit more about networking and Wi-Fi and internet and stuff, why don’t
you have a look on Skillshare for one of those courses!
If you click the link in the video description below you can get two months of Skillshare
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So stood here in the living room, where we previously didn't get a very good Wi-Fi speed
even stood right next to the router... let's see what speed we're getting when we connect
to the Orbi! There we are, so you can see we're getting a much better Wi-Fi speed 48,
49 so we’re pretty much getting our full internet connection speed through the Wi-Fi
now which is of course what you want when you're paying for that! Let's go and have
a look around the rest of the house and see what speeds we get in there.
In the kitchen/diner area where we were having trouble streaming for the exercise videos
[Music]
There we are, look at that... so we're still getting the full speed of Wi-Fi that we're
paying for here! That’s excellent, so now let's go and try the the bedrooms upstairs
where we got *no* Wi-Fi at all, and see what we're getting there!
[Music]
Now when we come upstairs and we're obviously much nearer to the satellite that we've got
installed here, the phone will seamlessly switch to use that as its Wi-Fi instead so
if we come into the kids’ bedroom... remember this is where we've got absolutely no Wi-Fi
whatsoever, before, it wouldn't work at all. Now we've got the Orbi set up, the speed we're
getting... look at that! 20... 28.... 30! Much, much better! Obviously we're a little
bit away, we've got a wall between us and the satellite, but we're still getting 30
Meg which is perfectly usable! Let's go and have a look in the guest bedroom... sat on
the bed in the guest bedroom, let's see what we get here... look at that, excellent! 30...
35... much faster Wi-Fi speed than before, well it actually works! It didn't even work