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I appreciate Amazon's awesome return policy, however the only way I was able to obtain a RMA was through multiple calls with Netgear Customer Support and their RMA division in San Jose. I think there is a hardware issue with certain Netgear X8 routers with the latest firmware release.
#NETGEAR R8500 DISCONTINUED SERIAL NUMBERS#
The two from Amazon has serial numbers starting "4P." and the one from Netgear starts with "4D.".
#NETGEAR R8500 DISCONTINUED UPDATE#
I'm now on my THIRD brand new router, two from Amazon (both failed, one that did not transmit the SSIDs for any of the three WIFI channels after 6 hours and the latest firmware update the second having the well documented "boot loop" error) and one directly as an RMA from Netgear's warehouse in Memphis. I want to let prospective customers know that Amazon must have a batch of faulty X8 routers. Don't make the same the mistake I did - it's cheap for a reason, it's an inferior product that's not fit for purpose. I have returned this router, thoroughly disappointed and have lost all trust for Netgear for an inferior product that should be withdrawn from the market for bad quality control on hardware/software/firmware. Managed to get the router to work well for 2-days then overnight the wifi stopped working reset a few times and so on but as I was still in my return period took no chances. The 2.4ghz had better distance, again as expected but awful speeds. Wifi distance on the 5ghz band is not great, but delivered good speed - as expected. One of the 5ghz channels were intermittent and then stopped showing?!, but I continued as was getting decent speeds from the other one 600Mbps u/d I used this as an AP setup was a pain but once I got access to the router managed to set up everything well. I read the reviews and in my wisdom thought it was all firmware/software and a few years later all would be fixed - how wrong was I. I also had trusted, what I thought was a great brand - Netgear. Reason for this particular model - AC5300 for $165 which I thought was reasonable for a router a few years old. Reason for buying was I had a 1gbs connection and wanted a router that would support this speed and give me the range I required across the house. My connection had been cutting out on a few WebEx calls, as I work from home mainly, I needed a trusted connection for my client meetings. Bought to upgrade from my Airport Extreme.