I purchased a Netgear Nighthawk mobile router from the Telstra Knox store on 23rd January 2020. I was quite happy with its initial performance but over time the internet was not responding or going so slow as to be ineffective.

I checked Telstra and Netgear community forums to find it was a common fault that could be overcome by disconnecting the router from power and then rebooting it. I continued this way until the problem worsened with the router functioning very well after a reboot to being non functional after a couple of hours.

Why does Telstra supply this product when so many users complain of these faults?

I conducted some comparison checks on internet speed with the Netgear Router and my Samsung Galaxy mobile phone. At times when the Netgear Nighthawk was running at 1Mbps the Samsung galaxy was running at 50 Mbps, suggesting to me that mobile coverage is not an issue at this location. Rebooting the Netgear router, it would run at around 100Mbps but a little time later would be back to very slow. The Samsung phone would still be giving speeds of around 50 Mbps.

I contacted Telstra Knox in August and Spoke with Krishna Nardesan. He understood the issues I was having with the router and suggested that a corrupted SIM card could be the cause. He arranged a replacement sim card suggesting that if this did not fix the problems he would supply a loan router while mine was sent for repair. When I spoke with him last week he couldn't help with a replacement router. The issues have progressively worsened and this morning the router was freezing during attempts at rebooting.

I have been trying to contact Netgear support but am not not having any success.

My wife is working from home as a Learning Support Assistant with the Education Department and requires fully functional internet for participation in online lessons, helping students in need and teacher meetings.

Forum Discussion

netgear nighthawk m2. drops to slow speed often.