Initially excited to see circle integration, figured that we can finaly do something that every other modern router has built in. Time limits on browsing for certain devices and some go beyond that feature set.
Since if you buy the circle hardware from best buy for $99 you get the following with no subscription fee;
Circle pairs wirelessly with your home Wi-Fi and allows you to manage every device on your network. Using the Circle app, families can create unique profiles for each family member. From here, kids will have a connected experience that is designed just for them.
Time Limits, BedTime, Filter, Rewards, Pause, OffTime, Usage (note - these are not premium features)
However, with netgear circle you only get filtering, pause and history (log) - the rest are premium features you can purchase additional functionallity for a subcription fee. And this subscription is only for wifi, if you want offline then you pay another subscription fee for that. So with disney Circle on netgear you get literally nothing that netgear already had with their genie app and opendns, and even less than that was capable of.
I think this is a big fail here Netgear. please stop using this as a sales platform and give me the same features that are built into other routers. The addition is only a marketting button for disney circle premium. Please correct me if I got this wrong.
Thank you. I totally concur. I already had the Disney box before I had bought orbi so when I heard the news I thought I would be able to ditch/sale the circle box but sounds like I'll have to keep it and just not use the netgear circle controls.
I was glad they added it and have no problem paying for the premium features. However, it's a huge fail as it causes internet connectivity drops every few hours. Disabling Circle via the iOS app resolves the issue. Even the most basic testing should have detected this problem before the firmaware update was shipped.
Also, the firmware should be smart enough to detect it's having difficulty communicating with the Circle servers and automatically disable it and send an alert to the router admin.
Looks like Netgear uses cheap Indian/H1B programmers and testers too....hopefully this giant mistake will show they're not so inexpensive after all.
