At the beginning of the pandemic, I purchased what I believed to be a better modem because we needed to work and do school from home. It was expensive in my opinion, being more than $300. My connection was not great when I connected the Orbi, but I reasoned that there were so many people at home that this was not surprising. My thermostat was never able to connect to the Orbi, but I thought that was due to the hardware on the thermostat. My son constantly complained about lagging and getting bumped off, but I figured that was due to the games he was playing. During school he would lose his streaming class, again I thought it was too many people on at once, so I purchased some excessively long network cables. My work phone which had to be hardwire connected to the modem kept losing connection. In the middle of November, the connection went out completely. The internet provider tried to troubleshoot the issue over the phone without success so they sent a technician to my home. Just to cover that bases, I had gone ahead and purchased another modem (not Netgear this time) so that it would be available when they came out just in case. He was unable to make the internet work and determined that the modem was defective. We connected the other modem and have had no difficulty since.
I contacted Netgear because, as I said, this was an expensive piece of hardware for me.They wanted me to confirm that the modem was defective, but at that time I didn't feel like shutting down the internet to troubleshoot would go over well since we had already been disconnected for almost a week. This morning, I was able to take some time to disconnect the other modem, reconnect the Orbi and call back. I contacted support, but they seem to be under the impression that the modem is just fine.
To be clear, the modem is not fine. It has never worked reliably. If I had any doubt of this, then I no longer do. I have had a very reliable connection with a modem that cost me only 30% of what the Orbi did for 2+ months. I will never purchase another Netgear product again; expensive, unreliable and unwilling to stand behind the product.
