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Forum Discussion
BR500 VPN Currently Experiencing Intermittent Connectivity Issues - Reply Thread
Update Oct 30, 2019
Dear NETGEAR BR500 customers,
Over the past two weeks we have experienced extreme instability with our VPN cloud ecosystem. We believe it is due to the scale of custo...
J'ai exactement le même problème que vous. Ce produit n'est vraiment pas abouti du tout.
I got three BR500 about 5 months for three different locations that are several hundred miles apart from each other. Since day one I have had to deal with random disconnects, which would require me to reboot the routers. I have also had a real difficult time managing these things remotely since you are REQUIRED to be connected to the management port to do some of the most basic things like port forwarding. Driving several hundred miles to a location just to setup a new port forwarding rule is not an option. So I have had to setup a computer at each location with LogMeIn so I can remotely administer them, which I think is totally stupid, but I see no other option. They advertise this great "Insight Cloud" portal and app, which I had assumed would allow me to do all these basic things, but no. Not to mention when the first firmware update came out, I niavely tried to update the router via the app, since the app was nagging me to do it and I wasnt about to drive 100 miles to do it.. Well it bricked that device during the update and I had to return it. Which put that location offline for several days and meant a drive out to that location.
We have several servers that are required for accounting department, warehouse and sales and when these connections go down, litterally the entire company comes to a halt. Needless to say my employer is not happy paying 300 employees to sit around and do nothing, not to mention all the lost sales and upset customers. All the heat falls on me, the IT guy, which is not fun.
I understand these are only $300 routers and its probably niave of me to assume I could pull off such a task with "cheap" devices, but they were advertised as "enterprise" solutions. Ontop of that, I am paying a monthly subscription fee for this service that doesnt work. I have gone from being a "super-star" IT guy for setting up a failry complex VPN network for cheap, to the excuse for all lost productivity, sales and customers.
The whole reason I got these devices was becuase I didnt know anything about setting up a multi-site-to-site VPN network and this looked like the perfect solution and Netgear has (in the past) been a brand that I respected and trusted. Today my company has been shut down ALL DAY, I have no idea if things will be working tomorrow, but I most likely wont have a job if its not.
Thanks Netgear, I have learned my lesson. You get what you pay for.
In Reply to Ekko_Coleman
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Our experience with this product is almost the same as yours.
While the concept of the cloud based VPN is brilliant - it has not performed at all as we all expected.
My customer is also pretty upset at this point in time.
So far downtime from yesterday is 18 hours and counting ......
While the Netgear support guys in South Africa have been great - it does not help that the BR500's and cloud based VPN fall over all the time.
I cannot believe that a company with a great reputation like Netgear has allowed this product to be launched.
Yes - you would expect the odd issue, and maybe an hour or two of downtime - My Netgear experience so far is days of downtime !!!!!
Netgear has had nealy a year to iron out all these bugs and put backup cloud services in place.
They dont seem to be too concerned in resovling these issues timeously, and end user frustration persists !!!!!
I have used Netgear products for over 15 years and this is the first product I would definately not recommend .....
Yes indeed, yet another VPN outage. Netgear has dragged its feet since I bought my BR500 kit so that I can no longer return it. They refused to even extend the warranty of this clearly flawed product. The support for this is so poor that I'm switching to Ubiquity after using Netgear stuff since it had "by Bay Networks" written in small print on my first router. This BR500 system will certainly be my last Netgear purchase.
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