@DamagedDingo Well you have more patience than most! Depending on where in the world you happen to be, the effects of the multitude of firmwares Netgear has released for this product, can seemingly vary from user experience. This forum is littered with hundreds of posts about the R7000 firmware. I can assure you, there are far more capable home routers out there. It just depends if you want to spend the money or trust your ISP to come up with a home router solution that works. I took the plunge and bought a bang up to date tri-band router and I've not had a single issue with it. You'd really have to ask the firmware boffins who keep pushing out multiple releases for this router why their firmware is causing problems. The fact they release so many firmware updates is enough to set alarm bells ringing anyway, especially if they cause more issues than they solve. The R7000 is a decade old concept and it shows.
It’s not a bad router if you stick to old firmware. It’s a old device now so my guess is they just don’t care. It’s been getting worse and worse for over a year until finally it just couldn’t hold a wifi connection. I was going to buy new one but thought I’d confirm it’s not software and was going to try 3rd party software but there is none compatible. The post I linked is top result on google which is why I made an account to give my findings because only way to prove it was hardware was to go back through all the firmwares. Funny thing is that is from 2018 and 2 years ago my device was fine and was on auto update. So that bit I can’t figure out.
Btw I have no patience at all, just broke.. I feel sorry for my neighbours who herd cursing for weeks.
@DamagedDingo And you summed it up in one, it's an old device. I found that even after just 2 years of use from buying new, I had something like 11 firmware updates, most of which to be fair I had no issues with, until v.128 which wrecked my WiFi. I then had a massive issue in that my WiFi6 enabled desktop PC would completely wipe out the R7000 5ghz band destroying my Wife's internet connection. We for a while had to resort to hardwiring her work laptop just so she could work but trailing an ethernet cable halfway round the house, was just not acceptable. In short, the R7000 was just no longer up to the job on my fully fibre network. My replacement AX router is doing exactly what it's supposed to.
From my research and personal experience, this seems to be both a hardware/manufacturing issue and firmware issue. I bought one of these for my home use in 2018, and it was rock solid for about a year. then it started having intermittent issues every few months, then monthly, then weekly, and now daily. Trying multiple firmwares and even FreshTomato would be a hit or miss but never as stable as when I first bought it. I found a much older thread where someone fixed their issue completely by re-soldering certain components and adding extra cooling. The later firmwares seem to run slightly hotter as well which exacerbates the problem.
This instantly reminded me of the LG G3 and G4 phones that would restart randomly and eventually bootloop due to poor solder joints from the factory which degrade and crack prematurely. People thought it was firmware issue then as well, but it just seemed like it was the "later" firmwares because it coincided with the eventual degradation of the hardware.
I have no way to re-solder the R7000 I bought, but I do have another R7000 which was provided by my work which was used just for testing. This one provided by work was actually an older model pre-2016 made in China (rather than Vietnam) but probably has saw less than 100 hours of use. I loaded up the latest .134 official Netgear firmware and no problems at all since. This same firmware was constantly dropping WiFi or rebooting on the R7000 I personally bought which was left on 24/7. Time will tell if this replacement will develop the same issue.
Also on a tangent, I opened up both routers and there are small hardware changes between the two I have.
Maybe I just got a bad one, but from seeing so many threads about this router, it seems pretty widespread. I'm definitely looking elsewhere for my next router.
