Anyone else want a refund for the Orbi that Netgear is slowly bricking via Forced Firmware?

kingtj

It's actually not too strong of a word. If you ask, you'll be told to try the next firmware revision. Again, and again, and again. I guess you could say "insist", but tsig would probably be scoffy about that as well. There are a lot of trolls here.

Oh, and @tsig, since I have had that experience, I'll answer your sarcastic question.

1. I contacted support about the disconnects that have been plaguing users since at least early 2017 (in the early 1.x firmware series) and they told me I was outside of my support window.

2. I wrote an Amazon review.  As a result of that review, Netgear got me in touch with a dedicated support rep.

3. After I realized this new support rep was just going to keep shoving new firmware at me, and not even attempt to understand the symptoms, I built my own way of verifying the issue. By this time, everyone in my house was bugging me about the disconnects almost daily.

4. I "demanded" (see, there's that strong language again) the product operate as advertised (using the test case as a validation point) or refund my money. They refunded my money and I shipped them back the unit.

Other people have just thrown their hands up and puchased other products. I understand that, but paying Netgear for this terrible experience was a hard pill to swallow.

t_k  Yeah....  and to be honest, Netgear is on thin ice with me anyway. Until this Orbi fiasco, I didn't have much reason to sign in here and post anything. But if you go back far enough, you can still find my comments trying to resolve problems with a Netgear USB wireless adapter that was constantly dropping the connection when used on a Windows 10 machine.  (Worked ok in Windows 7.)

There were over 7 pages of complaints and people trying alternative device drivers to force it to work better, but ultimately, it boiled down to Netgear just ignoring the whole thing, discontinuing the product, and moving on to sell you something else.  Because it was only a $40-50 adapter, I just bought a different one to get my system going and saved that on a shelf, to use with an old Windows 7 box if I ever needed it.  But the amount of time and hassle it caused me made me avoid Netgear products for the next couple years.

Where I work, we also chose Netgear for our 48 port PoE smart switches in 6 different regional offices. They got the job done at a fair price vs. competing products -- but we've had several fail on us, taking down whole offices until they can be replaced. And we've always had issues where the firmware seems to consist of 2 parts; a "base" layer and a portion of code that loads on top. The top layer is pretty straightforward to upgrade via web browser, as needed -- but that base portion has always caused grief. We got SOME switches to update it via TFTP but others just repeatedly failed and we had to leave them alone. Who knows what impact that has on our network?

I'm just seeing a "big picture" forming here that tells me I may need to pay more for other products in the future and avoid being tempted by "number of features for the price" that Netgear offers with things.

Round and round we go with support. Over 6 hours on the phone and nothing is working. All they want to do is try something else. They say they are researching and will call back....no call. They say let me check with my senior team and I get disconnected. The latest support rep said, and I quote “These are electronic devices and we can’t rely on them.” Outrageous. I’ve had it. Just want compensation for a system that doesn’t work anymore. I’ve demanded my money back, but not getting anywhere so far. I won’t give up!

Though much complaining, blogs, tweets, facebook messenger and on these support forums, Netgrear said they would escalate my case and have someone contact me. So far, a random call yesterday when I was in the car and couldn’t work with them. We agreed they would call back in 2 hours. No call until 5 hours later when I couldn’t take a break to work with them. I got an email from them saying to call in or schedule an appointment. At 9 am this morning, nobody could help until 4 PM, so a call was scheduled. So far, no call and we are going on over 30 minutes late for the appointment. It seems to me, Netgear doesn’t value my time or customer loyalty. To top it all off, Arlo security cameras go offline globally today! What’s going on Netgear!?

This has consistenly been my experience dealing with Netgear "tech support" for many years. They don't do a lot besides read off of a card with standard responses to your problems or questions. If you get them to escalate an issue, good luck getting a prompt resolution.

I used to have several of their 8-port ProSafe series smart gigabit switches, and they started fizzling out due to their AC power adapters going bad. I tried to get tech support to replace the bad adapter on one and the best they'd do is sell me another at an inflated price, plus shipping costs.  By contrast, my co-worker had a similar issue with a competing routing product and in his case, the company happily shipped a free replacement power adapter -- no questions asked.

Netgear really doesn't value customer loyalty ... at least not as much as they seem to value saving some money on the cost of phone support.