Netgear Releases New Router & Wireless Access Point

Today at CES in Las Vegas, Netgear released several new networking products. While Netgear is one of the leading providers for home, small and medium business networking appliances, the products released here primarily target small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The new products include an IPV6 switching line, Insight wireless access points along with an update to the Insight platform, and a new Orbi Pro Mesh Wi-Fi satellite.

Today at CES in Las Vegas, Netgear released several new networking products. While Netgear is one of the leading providers for home, small and medium business networking appliances, the products released here primarily target small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The new products include an IPV6 switching line, Insight wireless access points along with an update to the Insight platform, and a new Orbi Pro Mesh Wi-Fi satellite.

Netgear is calling their new switching line "Smart Managed Pro S350," and it supports Internet Protocol version 6. The series consists of five switch models all of which provide gigabit Ethernet with 2 or 4 SFP ports for fiber uplinks. Designed for networks where voice, video, and data are all carried over a single network, these new switches offer a range of 8, 24, or 48 Ethernet ports with all but the largest including power over Ethernet (PoE) plus variants. 

NETGEAR Insight Managed Smart Cloud Tri-band 4×4 Wireless Access Point (WAC540) has not only a 2.4 GHz radio but also two separate 5 GHz radios. Max throughput for the WAC540 is 3Gbps under ideal conditions. It comes with self-managing band-steering, beamforming, and load balancing as well as several other features that one would expect in a professional wireless access point. Netgear claims it can support hundreds of Wi-Fi client devices. At the same time as the release of the WAC540, Netgear is also updating the Insight Cloud Management platform to support remote management and monitoring of not only the new wireless access point but also their new Orbi Pro Ceiling satellite. This means that the new devices will be able to take advantage of Insight services like radio resource management to automatically optimize all access points both during installation and at a number of programmable times. Insight also provides device level backup and restore of devices along the ability to quickly add or replace devices by copying in a saved device configuration. 

Netgear’s new Orbi Pro Mesh Wi-Fi satellite was an honoree at the 2019 CES Innovation Awards in the Smart Home product category. The satellite can connect to the Orbi Pro Router or any other Orbi Pro Satellite with what Netgear calls a dedicated wireless backhaul. The satellite can be powered solely by ethernet cables using PoE, and when multiple satellites are in the same network they automatically manage their channels to provide low maintenance wireless service. 

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