Jessica is a network engineer, so she has some idea of when a piece of networking equipment isn’t working properly. Her Netgear router isn’t working properly, so she called up their tech support. She patiently sat through all of the normal troubleshooting procedures that are used for people who can barely tell a router from a toaster. Then she learned that they weren’t going to accept the router for repair or replacement after only eight months. So she did the only sensible thing: went out and bought a router made by a different company after being loyal to Netgear for more than a decade.

Being a loyal NETGEAR customer for over 12 years and I never really had an issue with them until recently. Being an Network engineer and having my bachelors in Computer Science and a CCNP to top it off I like buying the best techy thing. I purchased NETGEAR’S WNDR4500 after hearing good things about from online articles and reading its online sats of the highest speed, range, and etc. I was using it for basic home wireless routing, but shortly after 8 months it broke. I believed it to be from a broken port that wasn’t receiving an IP address. It wasn’t anything huge it had a Lifetime Warranty so I figured I would just call about it.

I called knowing it was going to be kind of a pain in the rear listening to them talk to you like a child to fix my issue or at least get a new one sent out, but I know they have to just go off procedure and its just general protocol. After an hour on the phone and with the technical support line going step by step of (turning off the box, checking to see if it had an IP Address, etc) they refuse to give me an RMA # to send it out to get it fixed.

Even though the guy knew I was a Network engineer and even help him out a little. Instead the guy transferred me to a manager who listened and then transferred me to another tech which that tech transferred me back to the beginning of the whole entire process. It was a long process not worth my time and instead I just bought a new nonNetGEAR router, but their lack of knowledge even on their own boxes confuses me and irks me to the core.

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