Re: A sincere word in support of Netgear

rhester72 · ‎2018-04-05

Over the past year or so, I've struggled along with many of you with the Orbi - particularly the firmware - in trying to find the right 'sweet spot' of software and configuration to meet my needs and use the features I'm looking for as a "best in class" router.

While the road has had many ups and downs, I'd just like to take a moment to relate something that just happened that you may find interesting.

I've had a pretty good relationship with Netgear engineering and support overall. When we were chasing the "ghost packet drops" issue in late 2017, I had the opportunity to interact with both groups directly - by email and phone - trying to get to the root cause of the issue (which, as some of you may remember, ultimately turned out to be an 'instrumentation problem' - despite many reports, there never were any *ACTUAL* monotonic packet drops over wireless backhaul).

You may have also seen that I posted earlier today that trying 2.1.3.4 (atop 2.0.1.4, as a regular consumer auto-update would observe, without resetting to factory defaults) resulted in very good performance, but I did experience a reboot of both router and satellite after 8.5 hours. I returned to my 'safe harbor' release of 2.0.1.4 and have had no further issues. I communicated this in a very low-key response to the 2.1.3.4 thread on this forum, buried deep in the hundreds of other responses, without opening a support ticket or raising any sort of fuss whatsoever - just a "hey, I did this and this is what I experienced" couple of lines reply.

Mere hours later, I received a very polite call from Netgear support requesting more information and offering suggestions for troubleshooting (starting with a full paperclip reset), with a promise of follow-up by e-mail or phone as appropriate after I attempt the upgrade again.

While this is almost certainly *not* the norm for most consumers (again, I have a prior history with Netgear and have been both an outspoken proponent and critic over the years), I wanted to let everyone know about this to say that I *do* believe Netgear cares, I *do* believe that they are indeed (at least as of recently, if not before) working very hard to improve the product and their communication with consumers, and that they may well deserve the benefit of the doubt in terms of their support of their product.

Obviously, it is impractical (if not impossible) for any company to provide this same degree of high-touch support for every customer and every problem report, so I'm not advocating people start ringing Netgear's phone off the hook hoping for a miracle. I also frankly have no idea whether this will result in an improved product or end-user experience for myself (with respect to Orbi stability), but I certainly have elevated _hope_ in all those regards as a result of them taking the time to personally interact and at least try to make things better.

Also, if anyone was wondering whether Netgear actually reads these forums or cares about what people are experiencing, I think you can now draw your own conclusions based on my story. They are *most assuredly* paying attention.

rhester72 · ‎2018-04-13

To my significant surprise, Netgear was indeed correct (even though I still can't quite understand how or why) - performing a factory reset on both satellite and router did indeed resolve the restart issue, and I've been completely solid on v2.1.3.4 without a single packet drop or restart since early this week. If you haven't tried a factory reset, do it - it's a pain in the butt but it's worth it!

FURRYe38 · ‎2018-04-13

Glad the reset helped. Thanks for letting us know and confirming.

Been saying this all along.

Ulairi · ‎2018-04-13

@rhester72 wrote:
To my significant surprise, Netgear was indeed correct (even though I still can't quite understand how or why) - performing a factory reset on both satellite and router did indeed resolve the restart issue, and I've been completely solid on v2.1.3.4 without a single packet drop or restart since early this week. If you haven't tried a factory reset, do it - it's a pain in the butt but it's worth it!

Plus one to this.

I've been reporting a speed bottleneck issue for a while now. It's been a common theme ever since I got the Orbi with firmware V2.1.1.18, V2.0.0.34 and V2.0.1.2. Updating firmware to V2.1.3.4. today similarly made no improvement. However, a factory reset (as painful as it was to re-establish everything) got my full download speeds back.

For anyone struggling with the Orbi performance, don't hesitate - 'factory reset' is the way to go.