No time total for day and no usage history after purchasing parental controls

Question

Parental controls were working as expected from the time I purchased the Orbi until the parent control trial ended.&nbsp; I purchased the year subscription but from that time the two profiles I have under parent controls no longer show any time being used each day and no usage history.&nbsp; I almost want to say bait and switch but there must be a technical reason why this stopped working once it was purchased.&nbsp; Any ideas?

DavidG1701 · Answer

I've had similar issues with my Orbi RBR850. I'm nearing the end of my one month trial and for a second time the parental controls have stopped working: no tracking of time, no filtering and no ability to pause devices. It first happened after about a week and deleting and recreating the users fixed it. It's stopped working again. I'm thinking to reboot the device and see if it resumes tracking and filtering.

Any ideas besides factory reset and setting up again? If I do a factory reset, what's to guarantee it won't happen again after a week or two?

I'm on V4.6.3.16_2.0.51. That looks like the latest after checking for updates just now.

Dmink99 · Answer

The controls was working for me during the entire trial, and shortly after but past month or so it's been nothing, no stats, time tracking or anything, just stopped. I can still pause manually for each profile but that's it.

johnh81 · Answer

I was close to having to do a factory reset but some combination of re-installing the iOS app, removing, and re-adding the child accounts, and rebooting all the Orbis seemed to have gotten this working again for me.&nbsp; Been solid for a couple weeks now.

Chuckg1 · Answer

I went through 3 cycles of factory resets to make SPC work. After reintalling and redoing all the profiles, I get at best 48-72 hours of parental control then it stops tracking usage and history without warning.&nbsp; &nbsp;I also noticed the devices online is highly inaccurate.&nbsp; This product is garbage , what are the alternatives?

DavidG1701 · Answer

Following up half a year after my previous response. I'm running the current v4.6.8.2 firmware now.&nbsp;At best I'd label parental controls and device management unreliable. After factory resetting my RBR850 Orbi it would still fail at trying to set up parental controls, as if it retained some previous, broken configuration. This error persisted with additional factory reset and reboots. &nbsp;Eventually the error went away on its own but at that point after reading other comments here and in other topics I decided to try just manually managing access. &nbsp;&nbsp;Even manual device management is problematic. At some point I always am no longer able to manage devices and get a&nbsp;CDIL-API-FAIL error when trying to get a device list. &nbsp;Restarting the main Orbi router resolves this for a time. &nbsp;Also, my RBS850 satellite now will sometimes reboot on its own. &nbsp;I don't know why.&nbsp;The core WiFi and network routing features of the Orbi have been and continue to be solid which has been my experience with Netgear products for over 20 years. However, the extra management and parental control features which are powered by an API and not accessible through the web GUI are unreliable and break over time. &nbsp;Maybe data gets corrupted? Maybe the service running on the router crashes? Who knows? I'm debating looking at alternatives to Netgear Orbi for future mesh WiFi networking. &nbsp;Unfortunately after looking at other products forums, they all seem to have their share of reliability problems.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Forum Discussion

No time total for day and no usage history after purchasing parental controls

5 Replies