Nighthawk R7000 Problems

JG08  diavolos  To be honest, this whole firmware update business with the R7000 AC1900 seems to be an issue that seemingly hasn't been resolved for at least the last two years when v.42 was/is apparently the only firmware that many users of the R7000 seem to advocate and trust. Would I personally rollback to a 2+ year old firmware on my own router? absolutely not because v.42 predated my router manufacture date (1st March 2019). V.42 might also have security holes that would expose my router to outside influences. What other users choose to do however, is their choice.

I purchased my R7000 unit at the begining of February 2020 with v.64 loaded out of the box and joined the Netgear Community to read of all of these issues and wondered maybe what I'd let myself in for. But the 'issues' never materialised, i.e. no dropping 5ghz WiFi. I made some immediate tweaks, the main one being disabling auto update. I've also disabled UPnP and router logging. Unfortunately, I'm unable to disable WPS which to me seems ridiculous that Netgear don't allow users to do.

Almost 2 months to the day from purchase, v1.0.11.100 hit Netgear's download page and so I upgraded the firmware from v.64. Three weeks in on the new firmware and still no problems, no issues whatsoever. I'm in the UK and I use a Draytek Vigor 130k modem. My ISP fibre package is 37mbps down and 9mbps up. I have absolutely no experience of the mega download speeds I often read of users here are on and nor will I probably for several years to come as cable just isn't offered in my locale.

So I'm wondering, what is so different about my one year old router that it isn't affected by random dropouts umpteen times a day without reason? I genuinely cannot answer that question.  My Wife and I have been on lockdown at home now for 5 weeks and she works from home 5 days a week without interruption. My laptop is connected to 5ghz WiFi for up to 16 hours a day without dropouts. We watch our TV through a ROKU+ streaming stick on the 5ghz band for several hours a day, again, no dropouts. Our cell phones are connected via 5ghz band, I have Guest networks set up with no problems. Maybe, I'm just lucky?

It just seems that this issue with 5ghz WiFi is just going to keep on going. I wonder though just how many R7000 users have actually taken their issue to Netgear directly and complained? I tell you what though, if my router does start giving me problems, I won't keep it, I'll just dump it and move on to another brand.