Orbi or Linksys EA9500+RE7000 or ?

[Sunnydude]

First off, I'm a very technical person (programmer for 15 years).

I have a large 3 story home and am looking to replace my Asus AC68U router. I have ethernet traveling to each of the floors from the middle floor, where the main router will be located, in a corner of the house. Because I am already wired, I was really looking for a solution that would provide ethernet backhaul YET still provide seamless roaming between the devices. As it stands now, I have different APs on the floors with different SSIDs, and it is annoying as my family dislikes having to switch back and forth all the time.

So, based on everything I have read, including the SNB review, the Orbi sounds pretty amazing compared to the other mesh competition. However, it doesn't support ethernet backhaul, and we have no idea if they will in the future. Granted, it has its own dedicated 1.7 band but the signal will be traveling vertically in our house, through the floor and many, many walls. I have my doubts on how much throughput we will really get.

I then heard about the EA9500 and RE7000 and its seamless roaming, with ethernet backhaul, and it sounds like it may be a good fit, however more expensive. I honestly haven't used a Linksys since a WRT54G and have no idea how their quality is now a days, let alone this combination. I've been a Asus fan for a very long time.

What are your thoughts? Do you think the Orbi 1.7 will still deliver or go the Linksys route or is there an alternative that I don't know where we also can receive seamless roaming?

Thanks.

 

[pete y testing]

I have different APs on the floors with different SSIDs, and it is annoying as my family dislikes having to switch back and forth all the time.

the make them all the same ssid name but different channels , the clients should change automatically anyway from ap to ap

YET still provide seamless roaming between the devices

nothing you have mentioned in your post above actually does seamless roaming and that includes the orbi , yes the orbi has ap steering but thats not seamless roaming as the clients still disconnect from one device to reconnect to another

if you want true seamless roaming you need to look at the ubiquiti unifi ap's that can do whats called zero handoff

if you have structures ethernet in place the orbi is a waste of money as its main job is wireless backhaul

but as suggested just change what you have so all ap's and your router have the exact same ssid name and passphrase but use ch 1 and 6 and 11 to separate the 3 transmissions

 

[thiggins]

Try the Orbi and decide for yourself

 

[RogerSC]

I had an RE7000 here, didn't find it stable enough to keep. There was initially some nice results, but after a couple of days things fell apart and went bad. This has been the case with a couple of the extenders that I looked at. Another couple of them never really did look good, they started out poorly and just got worse. All have been returned for unstable or poor performance.

On the other hand, the Orbi has been great. Up for about 10 days now, since I upgraded the firmware. Consistently great wireless throughout my house. And it does sort out 2.4GHz. and 5GHz. band use, all my devices that run faster on 5GHz. are put there, despite having only one SSID. I had my doubts, but I'm now really happy with it.

Anyways, while I can recommend the Orbi over any extenders that I've tried, as Tim says, you should try it yourself.