XR700 Issues & Absolutely Ridiculous Support

I wanted to give everyone an overview of the experience I have had with a 5 day old Netgear Nighthawk XR700. I've been a Netgear Nighthawk user for a while, an R7000 then an X4S after that. Fast foward to this past week, I decided to upgrade to the new XR700 just to have the newest along with my interest in DumaOS...

 

Hooked it up, did the firmware update, and set up my wireless network to match my previous settings. My wireless devices show up on the device manager, then suddenly no connectivity for any of them. My phone is trying to connect and giving me "Unable to get an IP address" errors". Nothing is connected short of a few hardwired devices. I tried rebooting, factory resetting...but to no avail. I tried another factory reset, changed the SSID and then individually connected and renamed each device in my home. This wasn't a quick process either, with numerous Nest cams and other annoying to re-name devices.

 

Everything is fine for a day or two, so I decide to log into the interface and turn off the 60Ghz wireless radio which is, honestly, pointless to be on at this point. WiFi radios reboot and guess what, same issue again, nothing connecting to it, IP address errors, unable to get new IP addresses.

 

I call support, but guess what, nobody is around at 7:30pm EST that can work on the XR700. They put me in a queue and tell me their 'advanced tech' is not available. 1 technician who works daytime only to service and support the most expensive residential router they sell? Okay. Call me back the next day, I am not even home. They ask me to call back, which I do, and guess what...THERE ARE NO PEOPLE WHO CAN SUPPORT THIS ROUTER. What a f*king joke.

 

I downgrade the firmware to the previous version (2nd firmware) and I am able to get connections back instantly, but now the log is filled with "[DumaOS] No wifi metadata for mac" errors every second to like 25 wifi devices. The interface is barely responsive if I can even log into it without erroring out. I am unable to reach this interface all night, and luckily get back into it today. Do an upgrade back through the interface, which by the way is still LAGGING like anything due to those mac errors, and go back to newest. Guess what, NO DEVICES ARE CONNECTING AGAIN.

 

Long story short, I downgraded again to the release firmware, and this is working fine.

 

If anyone out there is having any similar problems, the release firmware seems to be the most stable. So far this has been a nightmare and I am extremely disappointed in how Netgear handles this with absolutely TRASH SUPPORT. I want this router to be solid and feel confident that I can trust it into the future, but I am now 2 firmwares back to make this stable, and nobody can seem to help me.

 

If anyone has similar issues I'd be curious to hear and if there are any known fixes to these issues, happy to hear that too.