New - R8000 Firmware Version 1.0.4.84 Released

My configuration is – Consolidated Comm. DSL Bonded ADSL/VDSL/ETHWAN  the router is a Zyxel VMG4825-10A Firmware V5.11(ABFT.1)CO. The radios are disabled so the ISP router is only providing wired trafic to the X6 R8000 via CAT6 cable. I am on a remote mountain side and have no neighboring wifi signals in the areas so the air is clean. I’ve had the ISP for several years now with no connection issues using the Zyxel however the wifi range is limited hence the R8000. Since purchasing the R8000 wifi range is excellent when working although its been challenging to get stability from this router.  I am seriously considering running opensource firmware on the router to see if I can get some stability going on this router.  Ive only had the router a few months bought on amazon and did the latest FW upgrade then factory reset before starting. It ran smoothly with the old FW and then after updating about a month ago its been troubles. I dont recall the old FW ver. I’ve owned many netgear’s in the past so I trusted the update, my mistake.

For the connections on the R8000 router the following wireless clients at the time the internet connection stopped – 2 wireless security camera’s, 3 Roku’s = (2 stream sticks 1 TV) 2 tablets and 2 cell phones and 3 laptops (1 of which was downloading).  Wired is an HP laserjet and MAC MINI running PLEX media server local traffic only which non of the TV’s were streaming so normal idle traffic of most all the devices.  I was attempting to download 4 large files at once “CentOS ISO, Rasberry PI ISO, Debian ISO and Knoppix ISO” onto my laptop. The laptop doing the downloads  was configured on the first 5GHz along with a Cell phone and second idle laptop. The second 5GHz radio has 3 ROKU (1 TV and 2 Streaming sticks). The 2.4GHz radio has 2 security cameras and 1 laptop. BTW the Zyxel had all the same equipment connected for 3 years without issues even using a Netgear range extender which is now off in a box becuase I bought this great R8000.

The wireless radio configurations are

1 - 2.4GHz WPA-PSK [AES] auto channel enabled up to 600Mbs

2 - 5GHz WPA-PSK [AES] channel 44 – 1300Mbs

3 – 5GHz WPA-PSK [AES] channel 153 – 1300Mbs

Lan connection is set to auto and the connection between the Zyxel and R8000 shows 1000M/FULL.

I have no ACL, Armor, Circle or Metering enabled the rest of the router settings are default, its pretty basic stuff. I have the LED’s disabled because the lights bother me at night, other than power so I cant help there.  I was a systems admin/dev support for several years at a network and wireless engineering company that wrote many of the IEEE protocals. The company engineered wired/wireless protocols for Broadcom, Atheros and several other big mfg including Netgear. They also used what they wrote in house on their infrastructure before it released for GA so I’ve seen my share of bugs and this firmware was deffently not ready for general availability. I lost a lot of confidence in Netgear’s releases with this and I’m not here to test the stuff I paid for. Hopefully the information I gave was helpful and Netgear can put it to some good use. So I’m going to leave it at that and hopefully the next release will be ready for GA and not just another flop I can find plenty of opensource out there to run on the R8000 and work my way around the quirks while Netgear fixes their issues.