Netgear
About the vendor and its products
Netgear is mainly known for network products. The most relevant products are:
Netgear Orbi, a system for mesh WiFi consisting of a base station and satellites
In addition, Netgear has recently announced a combined Orbi satellite and smart speaker which both extends the range of the network and offers an Amazon Alexa-controlled speaker
Furthermore, Netgear offers a number of security products, under the brand name Arlo:
Security cameras, which come in different versions; with/without battery, etc. and with different types of accessories
Smart doorbells, respectively with battery or wired
In addition, there are a number of base station versions, Smart Hub, which enable integration of the products into smart home platforms
There a number of Netgear/Arlo apps, to control the cameras, network products, etc. The support for other platforms is very good; for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Home, IFTTT, Stringify, etc.
Our experiences
| Component | Room | Experiences |
|---|---|---|
Orbi mesh WiFi-system |
Office and other rooms | On our part, we have an Orbi system for WiFi, consisting of a base station and three satellites. We were generally pleased with this, but it should be mentioned that in the beginning there were some problems with the Apple Home setup, where a number of devices either displayed as unavailable or took very long to update their status. With a firmware upgrade in the summer of 2018, all of these problems disappeared, though. We also had to supplement the system with a second satellite to have sufficient network coverage for the Ring doorbell outside the front door, but it now seems this system is unable to handle the number of connected devices in the house. From having produced good coverage and high speed throughout the house, however, the WiFi now seems capped at around 20 MBps, and no advice on how to fix this has helped. I am pondering replacing it with a solution that supports Wifi 6. |
Arlo Essential Spotlight camera with base station |
Conservatory (camera)/living room (base station) | This is a smart camera acquired after we had already installed a number of other cameras, and the experiences are very good. Partly it is heavy and solid and thus easy to mount, and partly it responds very quickly and delivers good image quality. Setup was easy, but it does not support HomeKit Secure Video dessverre. To support Apple Home in general, a base station is required, which makes it more expensive than “stand-alone” cameras. |