I just wanted to provide some feed back to the community regarding my Nighthawk RAX40 Router that I purchased in May of 2020. I am not doing anything fancy on our network with the router, maybe 8 PC's and 5 VOIP phone, and some WIFI, with some reservations associated with the MAC addresses. Prior to purchasing it, I was a bit leary, as there were some post regarding RAX40' Wi-Fi. Nevertheless, I installed and moved forward.
Once a week, after a couple of months, the Wi-Fi just stopped working. You would have to reboot it once a week. Then, during a critical day a week ago, the router stopped working. A couple of the PC's, with fixed IP's would work, but nothing else. The router's control panel said it was working fine, all good, but it was not working. The VOIP phones continued to work, but the Wi-Fi and DHCP PC were dead when it came to LAN or WIFI. I rebooted the device several times, nothing. It was incredibly frustrating.
Unaware of what to do, I called NG's Tech support and after 20 minute of going through a process of having to pay them $89 for 6 months of support, just to talk to a tech, who I was hoping could remote in and correct the problem, I then waiting 20 more minutes to get to a tech where I had to go through the whole story again, another 15 minutes or so, only to be put on hold with the promise if we got disconnected they would call me back. Well after about 10 minutes on hold, we got disconnected and I never got a call back.
I am an old-timer when it comes to technology and I can tell you "technical support", with all its remote and offshore capabilities, has just gotten worse. You simply have people who answer the phones either "don't care" or who are not "well trained" in their ability to understand the problem. It appears most, if not all, are simply taught how to read a script and continue to say, "don't worry, we will get this taken care of for you!", and they don’t! I never got a call back, but I did get an email to rate their support!
I ended up getting another router up and running as a temporary solution. Then, I finally was able to reset the RAX40 and reconfigure it. It came back up and worked fine, for a few days, then crashed again...as it had from the beginning. I determined the problem was the DHCP service of the router was crashing. Therefore, it allowed the devices with static IP to connect. As our network and router are key component of our business, I realized the RAX40 is not a good business solution router. So, we pulled it and replaced it with a dedicated router and dedicated WIFI point.
I did contact NG and asked for a refund, as they basically didn't provide any help and I figured I would toss the router away, and they actually did contact me via email and approved the refund. TY. I would simply suggest if you are experiencing such a problem, just realize it is the DHCP Service. You might get it resolved by simply shutting off the DHCP services and starting them back up again. No sure, as i figured it out after the fact. But this experience just made me lose total confidence in NG's products and support. I hope someone takes that time to read through this and it helps them in the future with better products and better service. (NG should have like a 5-minute support buy, if the client says yes, then get them to support and allow them 5 days to pay! When transferring to support, get someone on the phone capable of answering the question. There are only a limiting number of things to go wrong and possible solutions!) Back in the day, there were nor tier 1, 2 and 3....it was all just 1! The person you spoke with, knew the product inside and out!
Exact same issue. DHCP service falls over. Many posts regarding it now, at least many perplexed ‘why is this doing this’ posts... all explicable by ‘DHCP service not working’.
