I thought I was making a good decision going with the Netgear Orbi RBR50. It wasn't cheap, but I figured if price is any indication, I'll be getting a fast, high performance solution for my house that will really help me working from home. I installed it about a week ago, following the instructions precisely but no matter what I do, no matter what I try, including resetting and rebooting my modem a dozen times, this product just doesn't work.

Maybe $400 isn't a lot of money to some people, but it is to me, and when I spend that amount of money, I actually, silly me, expect the product to work. And if it doesn't I would expect to be promptly supported, and if the hardware proves to be the problem, I would hope that there would at least be an apology. None of this has happened.

I have now wasted 5 hours of my life trying to get this piece of crap to work, including over 2 hours on the phone with tech support, only to be told that the hardware must be defective.

What's funny is that there are strong indicators that this is not a high quality product: there are TONS of these sold as "refurb" on Amazon, which really means one thing: you get a LOT of these back, which can only mean you don't get them right the first time around.

It is incredibly frustrating to waste hours on broken technology, and when the tech support casually just said to "please swap out the router with another unit" like I had a closet full of these things just waiting for the current one to fail really sealed the deal for me. Netgear, for whatever reason, no longer makes the simple, reliable, bullet proof products it once did. I used to heartily recommend Netgear to everyone. Never again.

I Know this is a company forum so perhaps it is rude to ask, but its no different than how I have been treated as a customer. So do any of you know a good brand of WiFi mesh products that will work right out of the box and perform as advertised? Anyone?

Forum Discussion

Where can I get a quality WiFi Mesh system? Apparently not from Netgear...