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Upgrade R7000 for R8000/P or R7800 - firmware stable ( your thoughts and experience)
My AC1900/R7000 is slowly showing its age and needs more reboots (and now a factory reset). I have been told and also saw many articles on the internet that a router's life is 3 -5 years max. with t...
My R7000 died (or started to) after 4 or 5 years. Randomly the power LED turned Amber and the router was 'dead'. A reboot brought it back to life but it still happened randomly.
I was looking for a Tri-band as I had some AC devices I wanted to be on its own SSID. I looked at a few vendors. I wasn't too pleased with NG's support as when I first got the R7000 I had DLNA problems with the USB drive. Netgear support always said they couldn't reproduce it and RMA'ed the R7000. I got a REFURBISHED on in exchange at the cost of $15 (USD) postage and insurance. Worse, the problem was there on it as well. ONLY THEN did they work in earnest on the problem. 2 or 3 firmware releases later it was fixed. Other than that the R7000 was basically solid for me. I was never really sure if the R7000 was giving up the ghost or not, but a rollback of the firmware, since that started about 2 weeks after an update, didn't fix it.
In my search I narrowed it down to some vendors, ASUS, LinkSys, Dlink, and some others. Having used ASUS and LinkSys before and had problems they were not really on the top of my list. So I looked at forums for those I could find. Some were not even on vendor owned servers. Looking at the subjects, well, the problems really echoed what one sees here. You never really know the severity of the problem, and even the number of relies isn't a really good indicator. It is user error, user not understanding something, user expecting something else, firmware install errors, hardware issues, router issues???
Next was research... and I mean reviews by websites that don't get paid to do reviews. SMALL NET BUILDER , CNET, TOMS HARDWARE, ZDNET, even AMAZON reviews of the interested routers. Actually I could have picked any of them... and cost was NOT a true factor as all were around $200 to $250 last March when I bought.
I did get the R8000, based mostly on these 2 reviews (https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/32474-netgear-r8000-nighthawk-x6-first-look, https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/32489-netgear-r8000-nighthawk-x6-review-part-2). Deciding factor was that all vendor's have about the same warranty, and some seem more restrictive (could be the legal wording though).
So am I happy with the R8000? Some people are NOT and do have problems, as witnessed here. I'm 'ok' with it. The present firmware has got some problems. Problems that appear to be in common with other routers as well, such as being able to edit the device names on the Access Contol list (I can change them on a mobil device and the changes hold). I recently discovered that my USB drive attached doesn't appear if the router is powered off and then on. I have to disconnect the USB drive either before turning off the router and once up plug it is, or 'chance it getting damaged as it is self-powered' by unplugging it when the router is on and then plugging it back in. Takes some minutes to rebuild the catalog and then it is up.
Another minor problem that might just be the network adapters... never pinned it down, but it seems to occur more often than it did when the R7000 was in place.
Also gave up on Smart Connect. Never worked as Advertised, and the last firmware release now has it handling all 3 bands vs. only the 2 5Ghz bands before. That change seems to have caused many here problems, but it might be part of the Attached Device lists (and the Access Contol list) not being complete or editable.
If it is down to r7800 vs. r8000, then Google "r7800 vs. r8000", a lot of GOOD references listed.
This one, https://analiti.com/compare/netgear-r7800.vs.netgear-r8000/ is quite interesting.
Both of these routers are NOT new. A lot of references are OLD, and of course, many are from people with problems. Good reading though. Many are ones I looked at determining which to buy. The 2nd 5Ghz band is what basically made my decision.
Based on my experiences with r8000, r8000p and r7800 I agree with microchip8. I sold my r8000 and r8000p due to ongoing firmware issues which were not getting any better. I am one of those that likes the additional things you can do with 3rd party firmware so this makes the r7800 attractive to me. Mine ran well, but I was not getting coverage I wanted so finally went next step up with more commercial solution.
I have the R8000P. I upgraded from a R7000.
While it has the FW niggles that others have mentioned, the router itself has been extremely stable. It has excellent performance and range. Some of its "features" however remain partially broken. Its FW releases continues to be buggy. Since I had a dual band router for many years, I opted for the tri-band as an upgrade.
The R7800, like the R7000 is one of the best routers Netgear has ever made. Dual band 4x4 with some of the best bandwidth, range and throughput available. While other routers are said to be faster, the R7800s hardware and FW has remained consistent with a high degree of reliability during its life.
If I had to choose between the R8000 or the "P", I'd go with the "P" (AC3200 vs 4000).
The R8000 supports "Circle", the "P" does not. So the R8000 is recommended for people with kids who are unwilling or unable to be the adult or dish out consequences, and the "P" is for people who don't have children or have raised their kids properly. Both offer very similar performance.
You already know why I moved to Triband. If I didn't have a NG router previously, I'd probably go with the R7800. Chipset and FW is more mature. It's also not going away anytime soon and will continue to be supported.
