Netgear Pro Support

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tm1900 wrote:

Is anyone using  Pro Support and if so, is it worth  the $79 for 2 years?   Any gotchas, tips are greatly appreciated.

* I have the Nighthawk MR60  product*

 

Thanks!

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I am using it and I HOPE that it will be worth it, but so far it has not been. 

I just got my Orbi setup a couple of weeks ago and initially I had some problems getting my

Orbi RBK753S to connect to the internet, which turned out to be caused by using the

Orbi app on my iPhone to set it up when my iPhone had an AT&T VPN running. 

After I solved that issue everything seemed to be fine except I could never go to

amazon.com, smile.amazon.com, and a couple of other sites, not only on my MacBook but also on my iPhone's browser ... most sites worked fine.

Eventually I called Netgear Support, who seemed unaware that I had purchased Pro Support until I mentioned it after they started talking about 90 days of support and I mentioned that I had purchased Pro Support, at which time they told me I had to call a different number.

I called that number and surprisingly reached a support person right away.

He wanted to control my computer remotely, so I let him do that, and once he got into the Orbi Settings I was observing what he was doing and I noticed that WAN preference;Internet IP Address section was set to "Use Static IP address". 

Now I KNEW that was not the way it was initially set up because I had taken a screenshot of the settings previously and it was set to "Get Dynamically IP Address from Router"

The only thing I can think of how that setting got changed is that we had a momentary power interruption between tie time I set up the router and the time I couldn't go to those sites.

Sometimes when I tried to go to these sites I would get a browser message:

"404 Not Found 198.55.97.98 - no redirects at this IP". 

When this was happening the IP Address that should have been dynamically obtained from the ISP (but was now set as a Static IP was 98.151.2.155 with a Netmask o 255.255.224.0 and a Gateway of 98.151.0.1.

I asked the NG Technician several time if he was SURE he wanted to leave the settings as "Use Static IP address" instead of "Get Dynamically IP Address from Router" which I was sure it had been before, and he insisted he was sure.

In total we ended up doing 3 sessions in which he was controlling my computer remotely, and in between those sessions he was asking me to be on hold while he "checked his resources".  At the last of the 3 sessions he did some weird thing with the DNS settings besides leaving "Use Static IP address" for the Internet IP address section ... he set the DNS to be "Use these DNS Servers" and used 4.4.2.2 or I can't recall exactly but it was composed of all 4's and 2's.

At that point when it still didn't work he gave up and said he was going to transfer the case to a Senior Techncian who allegedly would call me in an hour OR (something about a shift change) and if that person didn't call I could call back.

At this point I had no internet connectivity whatsoever ... NONE ... and I couldn't access the router settings either with the IP Address he claimed would work if I typed it in the browser.

At this point in my fury I decided to try to access the router settings with the Orbi app and when I opened the Orbi app I got a message that to "avoid conflict with your ISP settings Orbi has changed your LAN IP address to 10.0.0.1 (rather than the default of 192.168.1.1).

So then I was able to access the router with my browser by typing 10.0.0.1 in the browser and I then changed everything back to the the way it was in the screenshot of the original settings (with not using a StaticIP address) but leaving the IP address as  10.0.0.1 rather than

192.168.1.1.  Now all the connected devices have IP Addresses in the 10.0.0.X range rather than 192.168.1.X, and all websites work fine.

So the short version is I am not impressed with the Pro Support so far... maybe if I have another problem I hope it would be better next time... they can't all be as clueless as the person who "helped" me! 

The only thing good about this time was  they actually answered the phone right away unlike the regular support number  which usually wants you to try again another day orbe on hold forever. Your mileage may vary.