A6210 cannot create wireless hotspot!!!

You know, as a side note, I have had nothing but huge headaches with Netgear products after trying them out.

I bought two of these A6210 adapters off Amazon.com on the "netgear" product page a while back.  The description page was posted as a "retail" product.

When I finally got the products, they suspiciously came in two brown boxes, no official packaging, just pink bubble wrapping in each of them.  I tried the products briefly at the time, and they connected to wifi fine, so I didn't think too much about it.  A few weeks later, after setting up the internet at my place, I wanted to use different computers around the home as mini hotspots to expand the range of my wifi network.  Of course, with the issues that these adapters had, it was impossible.  Their current driver (as well as 3 drivers before it) did not support creating a hotspot, and would just fail to do so each time.  Searching day after day for any online resource to fix this issue come as a waste of time.

I eventually wanted to contact netgear directly to help them troubleshoot the issue.  On their support page, it asked me for the serial number on the devices.  When I looked at the side of my A6210 adapters, I noticed that right under the barcode, the serial number had been blacked out with a permanent marker.  I talked to netgear about this, but they said the products without a serial number are not retail products and therefore they didn't have to help me.  Support and service were only for people with a valid serial number.  By the time I contacted Amazon about the issue, it was well past the 30 day return period, and I was done there too.  I have no idea why cheap "non retail" netgear products are being circulated around when netgear is suppose to offer a proper warranty and support for their products, but that was just how it is.  I continue to question whether Netgear might be purposely scheming this type of business model just to cut back money on their support.

Now, posting on the forum, I get a response about "adhoc" mode, which is not even remotely related to what I had originally posted.  And thus, generic and unrelated answers would give off the "appearance" of trying to be helpful, but not really doing so.  I am under the suspicion that Netgear is not even planning to give real support.  Perhaps, they DON'T plan to forward this information to their driver development team, and thus NO NEW DRIVER will ever be developed for the device.  Because after all, that would COST MONEY.

The issue is simple.  A new driver needs to be developed for infrastructure mode.  Your current driver even LIES  directly to the users face.  The "netsh wlan show drivers" command in the cmd prompt returns a "Hosted network supported :Yes" which is a lie.  You purposely programmed your drivers to return "yes" but failed to provide drivers that support the "hosted network".  This is blatant false advertisement and shady business practice in general.

At this point, I would just advise others to be extra careful when dealing with Netgear products.  If you do choose to purchase one, make sure that everything is in complete working order, and that all documentation and serial numbers are present.  Because, if there is anything that even slightly bothers you, you should return the product immediately and get a different product.  Netgear seems quick to try to strip away your warranty even though I could provide all receipts and invoices about my purchases.  Netgear also has support that fails to understand the basic difference between adhoc mode and infrastructure mode, and just answers with a generic "check another person's post" instead of addressing the issue.  Yet, this is the type of person working in "support"?  I assume that support representatives of a tech company SHOULD have SOME DETAILED knowledge of the tech their company is offering instead of just basic knowledge that everyone else knows.  Because after all, anyone else can type "check another person's post".