Hello and welcome to another Switched On Network video, and summer is finally here at long
last! So it's the time of year where we can get outside into the garden, have fun and
games, garden parties barbecues, and other things like that. Now if you've got a large
garden where you want the Wi-Fi outdoors or maybe you run a business where you want Wi-Fi
to be usable outdoors, then the Netgear Orbi Outdoor Satellite might be just what you need!
Netgear were kind enough to send this one over for me to have a look at, so let's take
a look and see how well it works!
[Logo / Stinger]
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and more. I'll tell you more later in the video, or you can click the link in the video
description right now!
Now you might be thinking, “Well why do you need good strong Wi-Fi in your garden?
Can't we stay away from our phones for, y’know, one afternoon whilst we’re outside?!”
And that's a fair point! But it's not just so that we can all go stare our phones whilst
sat out in the garden rather than staring at them inside! It's useful to have Wi-Fi
out in the garden for a number of reasons for example, here in the summer house here
I've got a chromecast audio set up so it's nice to be able to listen to music and cast
from your phone to there, without having to y’know, use your mobile data or set up something
else out here, so that can be good for things like barbecues and garden parties when you
want to have some music on. Plus, on a nice summer's day like today if you work from home
like I do, it's actually quite nice to be able to come down to the bottom of the garden
and sit in the summer house or on a table and chairs and get some work done. So, er,
yeah let's get this unboxed and see how it looks!
[Music]
In the box you get the Outdoor Satellite itself, a power adaptor (and mine has one for mainland
Europe and UK-style plugs, so that’s a nice touch) and the mounting brackets which allow
you to mount the satellite either to a wall or on this plastic stand.
Flipping the unit round we can see some cooling fins on the rear and then towards the bottom
we have the LED On/Off Button, the Sync button, a reset button, the power button and the power
connector. These buttons are all sealed for waterproofing and the power connector makes
a waterproof seal, too. You’ll notice that there’s no ethernet port on this unit - that’s
not because of waterproofing but because of security - ie. to stop anyone maliciously
connecting to your home or business network with unrestricted access via a cable. It’s
not hard to see the logic behind this, although some folk have commented that Netgear could
have just given the option to disable an ethernet port via the app, and/or lock down access
by device MAC address etc., but Netgear have opted for the simpler approach of not including
one at all on the outside unit. This of course does mean that we’re limited to using wireless
backhaul only when using in Orbi mode, but that shouldn’t be an issue and we’ll see
how well that performs at the bottom of my garden when we set this up.
You’ll notice I said when “in Orbi mode”. Now what’s great about this newer version
of the outdoor Satellite is that it will ALSO work as a standard Range Extender with any
type of wireless router, so it’s not just restricted to people who have an existing
Orbi or Orbi Pro system. Opening it up to owners of any router obviously makes good
business sense as the potential target market for the device will be far greater. The advantage
of using with an existing Orbi system though is that it’s tri-band so will make use of
a dedicated 5GHz wireless backhaul back to the house, leaving ALL the main bandwidth
available to blanket my garden - and probably the neighbours’ too! - with strong, fast
WiFi. Plus, both my main and guest networks will be usable in the garden, so that’ll
be great for when guests come over for things like BBQs or garden parties.
If you’ve not yet seen my full review of the main Orbi system, click the “i” up
in the top corner and there’s also a link in the video description to check current
pricing and availability for all the various options and versions of Orbi systems. So now
let’s head to my garden where I’m going to try and set it up!
I'm hoping to install the Orbi Outdoor Satellite here, on the side of my summer house and I've
positioned the router and satellites back in the main house with that in mind. Pp in
the loft up there you can see I've installed the satellite right by the edge of the wall
so it's as close as possible to the garden to give the best chance of getting a good
speed down here for the wireless backhaul and when I'm down here at the summer house
I'm still sometimes getting as much as 30 Meg down when I test it on my phone which
is quite impressive considering it's about 28 meters from there all the way down to here!
So hopefully that won't be too far for the wireless backhaul to work well... we'll see
how that goes! Now on the Orbi website the video animation there does show quite a large
distance although it doesn't say how far, so hopefully that'll work. I'll be very impressed
if it works well down here so let's go and set it up and see how it goes!
So here we are up in the loft bedroom and here's the Orbi satellite here which I'm hopefully
going to be daisy-chaining the outdoor satellite off and that's going to live eventually of
course down in the summer house over there. So let's see how easy and quick this is to
set up! The first step is to connect the outdoor satellite to your power source, and press
the on button. The Quick Start Guide says that when the satellite is powering up it
should pulse white on the bottom which we can see there whilst it's booting up and when
it goes solid white we're ready to do the next stage. The setup process to get the Orbi
outdoor satellite synced up to the rest of the Orbi system is very simple and you don't
even need the app or the web interface if you're going to be connecting it to your router.
I'm actually hoping to daisy chain the outdoor satellite off the satellite that's up here
in the loft though, so I'm not going to be pressing “sync” on the router, I'm going
to do that on the app. So if we open up the app and press “add satellite”... it's
now telling me to press the “sync button” on the back of the Orbi Satellite. Then press
next on the app... it's now saying “detecting satellite” so we'll see if it picks it up
and if it all works okay!
Now you might not be able to see it because it's quite light in here, but the bottom LED
here has lit a solid white which shows that it's syncing up so we'll just wait five to
six minutes and see what colour that goes.
So the outdoor satellite is now all synced up, paired and working with the rest of the
Orbi system when inside the house, so now it's time to plug it in down here and see
if it's going to work all the way down here at the bottom of the garden.
[Music]
So now the Orbi Outdoor Satellite is all powered up synced up and connected and mounted on
the wall here as you can see. There was a little bit of faffing around, I think it sort
of connected to each three individual access points in the house and maybe selected the
best one, but it settled on the loft satellite which is obviously the one I was hoping it
would connect to because its nearest to here! And that that's showing up in the app and
on the web interface with the backhaul status of GOOD, which is excellent news... it's got
a good strong wireless connection even though it's about 28 metres away so I'm really impressed
with that! And I've done some speedtests already down the bottom of the garden here and I'm
getting some really good speeds obviously when stood right next to it. If I do a little
speedtest now on the phone...
I have a 200 megabit Virgin Media fibre optic broadband connection to the house and after
setting up the Orbi outdoor satellite I was absolutely amazed to still be getting at the
bottom of my garden a 198Mbps: really impressive!
Being outdoor and weatherproof it can stay here all year round, come rain or shine and
right through the depths of winter as it’ll cope in temperatures right down to -20ºC
and all the way up to 50ºC for the summer. Now that I’m getting great WiFi speeds in
the garden I can sit down here to do some work in summer’s days, and it’ll be good
for things like outdoor security cameras and music streaming too, or even an evening movie
session outdoors!
Another cool feature of the Orbi Outdoor satellite is that it features a light, which is great
for use in the evenings when you sat outside having a drink or whatever. That isn't necessarily
something I'd expect to see on a Wi-Fi router but I guess it makes perfect sense because
it's hardwired into the mains and it lives outside and it's going to be in these sort
of areas where you're socializing! You can control it on the app and you can set schedules
for when it comes on and off and control its brightness and stuff, as well. So it's pretty
cool... thumbs up for that, Netgear!
Now I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting too much from the Outdoor Satellite in my
garden. I was genuinely planning for a chunk of this video to be me saying aah what a shame,
I can’t mount it on the side of my summer house because it’s too far away, I’m mounting
it here instead, closer to the house. But I’m genuinely really impressed that that’s
wasn’t the case! This thing works brilliantly!
Occasionally I do see the status of the backhaul connection dropping to amber on the app, and
sometimes it flips between being daisy-chained off my loft satellite on 5GHz to the main
router in the lounge via 2.4GHz - but I only really notice that because I’m a geek and
I’ve kept checking on it in the last week or so for this review - even when in that
state I usually still get phenomenal speeds in the garden although sometimes the speeds
outside do drop a bit when it flips to the weaker living room connection. It would be
great if you could specify a preferred access point for Orbi Satellites to piggy back off,
as I’m not sure why it’s sometimes preferring the far-away router to the nearby satellite!
But as I said, it’s not really a big issue and I only really noticed because of my eagle
eyes for the review.
So with the Orbi Outdoor Satellite you can expect to get really good speed WiFi all over
your garden or other outside area and now that I’ve got mine set up I bet the neighbours
will be wanting to use the Guest Network on it too! I may never have to pay for beer again...!
I also popped round to my neighbours three doors down to do a speedtest in their garden
and guess what... I was still getting 132Mbps down over MY wifi in THEIR back garden, which
is really pretty phenomenal.
My only complaint is that the power cable doesn’t disconnect from the brick which
means even though the cable itself is quite thin, the hole I had to drill needed to be
about 17mm wide so that the plug at the end would fit through - a thinner, detachable
plug for the inside end would have been good, and allowed me to thread it through a much
smaller hole.
Pricing wise, this certainly isn’t a cheap or low-cost piece of kit, so it might be out
of the budget for some home users. However, if you have a big garden that you use a lot
in the summer - or if you’re a business and you have a large outdoor space that you
want to blanket with WiFi then I can see this being really useful, especially in the hospitality