The Orbi 970 Series is NETGEAR's flagship WiFi 7 mesh system which stands out for its impressive speeds and coverage. At its core are innovative features that make it the most advanced and powerful WiFi system on the market. One of the key features of the Orbi 970 Series is its Enhanced Dedicated Backhaul.
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Introducing Enhanced Dedicated Wireless Backhaul:
What is Wireless Backhaul?
Wireless backhaul is the WiFi connection that links a Mesh Router to Mesh Satellites, facilitating inter-device communication. This WiFi backhaul radio channel often shares bandwidth with connected devices via the fronthaul, which can lead to reduced overall performance and increased latency during periods of high traffic. However, these performance issues can be mitigated with a dedicated radio channel, as seen in the Orbi 970 Series Mesh system. Understanding the differences between fronthaul and backhaul is crucial for optimizing network efficiency and performance.
The Mesh Performance Solution: Enhanced Dedicated Wireless Backhaul
At its essence, the Enhanced Dedicated Backhaul builds on NETGEARs patented dedicated backhaul technology by incorporating WiFi 7 enhancements. It uses Multi Links Operation (MLO), a WiFi 7 feature, to combine dedicated 5GHz and 6GHz band to forge a specialized mesh network backhaul connection between the Orbi router and its mesh satellites. This design allows the Orbi system to achieve unimpeded speeds up to 10 Gbps across entire Orbi mesh system. This ensures that your internet traffic reaches every device without any added latency no matter the speed.
Optional 10Gb Mesh Ethernet Backhaul
Optionally users can configure the included 10G Ethernet as a backhaul. What makes Orbi 970 unbeatable is that Ethernet backhaul can be combined with Wireless backhaul. Users can mix a match wired and wireless backhaul based on home layout. Ethernet backhaul can be used to connect a router to a satellite or even to connect a satellite to another satellite.
Dedicated 5GHz Advantage
Using dedicated 5GHz for backhaul has a distinct advantage over 6GHz. Regulatory compliance requirement allows 5GHz to transmit at higher power than 6GHz. This translates into more distance between router and satellite using 5GHz compared to 6GHz. To allow for maximum coverage Orbi 970 uses 5GHz as dedicated backhaul.
Orbi 970 also has a dedicated 4×4 5GHz radio for fronthaul i.e. dedicated for all WiFi client devices at home. As 5GHz WiFi has been in use for several years, it is expected that most of the current WiFi clients use 5GHz. In order to ensure that system has ample capacity for multiple clients to operate simultaneously, Orbi 970 has dedicated a 5GHz band just for clients.
Enhancing Backhaul using 6GHz
While 6GHz spectrum has been available since introduction of WiFi 6E,WiFi 7 makes use of 6GHz band much more efficiently to get much faster speeds – 2.4 x times faster than 6E. It does that by doubling bandwidth from 160MHz to 320 MHz, it is like doubling number of lanes on a highway. Further WiFi 7 uses 4K QAM up from 1K QAM in WiFi 6E. Higher QAM is like packing more data in same packet. Use of 4K QAM gives additional 20% speed increase.
Orbi 970 has a 4×4 6GHz radio that has a capacity of ~11.5 Gbps. While adoption of WiFi 7 ramps up it is expected that initially users will have very few new WiFi 7 client devices that will make use of this available capacity. Orbi 970 reused most of the unused capacity to further enhance backhaul performance. WiFi 7’s MLO technology is used to combine 6 GHz with dedicated 5GHz to get even faster, up to 10Gig faster, backhaul.
MLO Advantage
While link aggregation technology itself is not new, what is unique about MLO in WiFi 7 is that the combining of two WiFi links is done at the physical link level, which essentially means that there is virtually no added latency while combining the links. This is a huge advantage for high bandwidth intensive and latency sensitive applications like Gaming, HD Video conferencing and AR/VR applications.
Benefits Legacy WiFi devices
Using Orbi 970 users will get performance benefit for all WiFi devices, including legacy WiFi 6 and WiFi 5 devices. As Orbi 970 is a mesh system, it makes full advantage of WiFi 7 technology in its backhaul, thereby increasing the backhaul speed from ~2 Gbps in prior generation Orbi to 10Gbps. That is 5x improvement that will be passed on to all the client devices be it old or new. That essentially means that even if you don’t have any new WiFi6E or WiFi 7 client you will still see huge improvement in coverage and speed for all your connected devices.
Get Enhanced Dedicated Backhaul with Orbi 970 Series
The Enhanced Dedicated Backhaul elevates the Orbi 970 Series to its elite status. Offering a suite of benefits ranging from unparalleled speeds to reduced latency, it truly redefines the wireless experience. For those on the quest for the pinnacle of WiFi performance, the Orbi 970 Series, with its state-of-the-art features and readiness for the future of wireless networking, is the definitive choice.
