Netgear – JUST SAY NO

I have purchased too many wireless routers in my life. As someone who manages IT and technical departments and divisions, I have had to put a LOT of equipment into service over that time. Last year, Netgear was supposed to be good equipment. IT WAS NOT!

Can someone tell me why Netgear products are so bad and their customer service is non-existent? In the last few years, I purchased a number of Netgear 802.11 wireless routers (WGR614) for personal and company use. Strangely, every single one of them has suffered from the same problem: they simply drop off line randomly from time to time, requiring a power off and on reset to get them talking again. I reported the problems to Netgear who said basically that they had never heard of the problem, and would not replace the units. Yet it happened to 5 units all bought within a few weeks of each other. Most of them have been taken out of service, but the one I have at home I continue to use from time to time, especially when we have guests.

Recently, it was suggested by Netgear that I do a firmware upgrade. I went to Netgear’s support site, found my unit AND the proper version number, and downloaded the new firmware for that version number. I used the built-in update function to do the update, which responded that it had completed successfully and asked me to reboot the router.

Unfortunately, when I rebooted the router, it immediately failed and refused to power up correctly. Several emails (the only way to get help from Netgear without paying more money) basically told me that if my unit was less than 30 days old, I could send it back, otherwise, basically, I could pay about what a new unit costs to have it repaired. They REFUSED to address that thier updater or the file may have been bad, or that a unit that worked before the update was now just so much junk.

Well, I give up on Netgear. I buy many thousands of dollars of network equipment a year for companies where I work and consult, and not one more dollar will ever be spent on anything Netgear ever again.

Save yourself some heartburn, by Linksys from Cisco or Airport from Apple, and you will be happy!