Netgear WBE710 review | IT Pro

Netgear has always had a sharper focus on the consumer Wi-Fi 7 market with its extensive Orbi and Nighthawk router families but it also offers two business-class access point (AP) solutions. The flagship tri-band WBE750 delivers a big BE18400 rating with an equally high price tag. The lower-cost WBE710 we have on review targets budget-conscious SMBs.

The WBE710 keeps the price down by presenting two spatial streams on each radio, which deliver a lower BE9400 rating, claiming maximum speeds of 688Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz radio, 2,882Mbits/sec on 5GHz, and 5,765Mbits/sec on 6GHz with the ultra-wide Wi-Fi 7 320MHz channels enabled. As you’d expect, the LAN port is the 2.5GbE variety, but it only requires an 802.3at PoE+ power source.

One of the most prominent features of these APs is their size, as they are both easily the smallest business Wi-Fi 7 APs currently available. Whereas all competing Wi-Fi 7 APs use their metal back-plates as passive heatsinks, the WBE750 and WBE710 have an internal cooling fan located behind a circular inlet at the front.

You have two management choices as the WBE710 can be deployed in standalone mode, where it presents a local web interface. Alternatively, you can move it all into the cloud and use Netgear’s Insight portal – the AP’s price includes a one-year subscription to the Premium service with further subscriptions costing around £8 per year for each device.

Netgear WBE710 review: Standalone management

Deploying the WBE710 is simple as its web interface presents a ‘Day Zero Easy Setup’ option where you select the country of operation, change the default admin password, and create your first secure SSID. The console opens with an informative dashboard that provides details on connection status, client distribution across SSIDs and radios sorted into OS types, traffic distribution by SSID, and a real-time traffic trend graph ranging between two and 48 hours.

Up to eight SSIDs are supported, and you can choose to make them available across all radios or only on selected ones and use different security settings up to the stronger WPA3. Advanced features include client isolation, rate limits, URL tracking, and basic captive portals using click-through or external authentication.

You can still access the standalone interface when the AP has been imported into Insight, but all settings that are being cloud managed are greyed out. There is one good reason why you may want to use the local console, as this is the only way you can view the AP’s fan status.

The dashboard’s traffic trend graph can be swapped to show the fan speed and temperature, which can also be viewed from the interface’s system monitoring page. During testing, we found the fan would only turn on occasionally when the internal temperature went above 65C and it was virtually silent in operation.

Netgear WBE710 review: Insight mode

Netgear’s Insight cloud portal can be used to centrally manage distributed wireless networks along with Netgear’s Insight-enabled switches and routers. Adding the WBE710 to our account was a cinch as we used the Insight iOS app on an iPad to scan its QR code and assign it to a predefined site in our Insight organisation, after which it started broadcasting our preconfigured SSIDs.

Insight offers the same level of access to the AP’s wireless features as standalone mode, but adds extra services such as meshed network creation. One AP that is wired to the network is set as a root device, and you expand the network by adding node APs that connect wirelessly to it.

The Insight portal’s summary page shows the health of all cloud-managed Netgear devices and an overview of wireless activity, while a topology map reveals which APs clients are connected to. The Wireless page provides plenty of widgets so you can see graphs of wireless traffic for each AP, client connection trends, their individual data consumption, and detected OSes.

Insight’s captive portal features are superior as guest SSIDs can have redirect URLs, custom logos, AUPs (acceptable use policies), and session timeouts assigned. Authentication options include basic click-through with redirect and web authentication using a third-party provider, an external Radius server, or the paid-for RaGaPa cloud service.

Netgear WBE710 review: Wi-Fi 7 performance

For Wi-Fi 7 testing, we connected the AP to the lab’s Zyxel XS1930-12HP 10GbE PoE++ switch, which confirmed a 2.5GbE connection and a PoE+ power draw. For our wireless client, we used a Lenovo desktop client running Windows 11 Pro 24H2 and equipped with a TP-Link Archer TBE550E Wi-Fi 7 PCIe adapter.

To test raw TCP performance, we used Microsoft’s NTttcp utility, which recorded good upstream and downstream speeds of 258MB/sec and 202MB/sec between the wireless client and a Windows server on our 10GbE LAN. Real world speeds over SMB were lower but still respectable, with large file copies between the client and server returning a top average throughput at close range of 218MB/sec and 182MB/sec at 10 metres.

The WBE710 supports the Wi-Fi 7 MLO (multi-link operation) feature, and this can be enabled in the AP’s local interface or from Insight. Our TP-Link TBE550E adapter supports MLO using MLMR (multi-link multi-radio), and although it created an aggregated link, further tests showed no appreciable performance improvements.

Netgear WBE710 review: Is it worth it?

Not really. A price tag of £270 excluding VAT makes the WBE710 a comparatively expensive entry-level Wi-Fi 7 AP. TP-Link’s BE9200 Omada EAP773 and EnGenius’ BE9500 ECW526, for example, cost £191 and £225 respectively, and both are endowed with 10GbE ports, which delivered superior speeds in our lab tests.

The WBE710’s internal cooling fan may be an issue as although it significantly reduces the size of the AP, will limit placement options due to increased dust ingress. On a positive note, the WBE710 comes with a 5 year warranty, and Netgear scores highly for cloud management as its Insight portal delivers an excellent range of features with the price, including a one-year subscription.

Netgear WBE710 specifications