Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My story is a little different in that I may end up returning the product but I will give it a good rating. Let me explain in hopes that this review will help out other reviewers who have encountered similar problems. -- Before I Purchased the Equipment I read nearly every review that I could. I was well aware of some of the issues. But what won me over was how the NetGear customer service team really owned the issues and asked the customers to respond to them. This was far better than the experience I've had with Time Warner/Spectrum cable. --Before Buying My Cable Modem My issue was that my internet was undependable. I'd see speeds go from 100 to 20 with my default cable modem rental. A friend suggested that I try another modem as that is often a cause of it. Keeping in mind that I am paying for an Ultimate 300 MB/s package and I can never get over 100, you see the frustration -- especially when your job involves heavy downloading. So, after multiple calls to the cable service provider, I purchased the modem. --The Initial Speed Results... After spending all day with the cable company getting it connected, I was surprised to find it running even slower than before. Furthermore, I could no longer stream content like movies from YouTube or Nextflix. I reached out immediately to Netgear support to see if there was anything they could do before I returned the modem. --NetGear Support.. It took 45 minutes on hold to reach support but I waited (be nice if there was a call back). Finally, I reached support. I was surprised by the quality. The Netflix support engineer walked me through the diagnostics and she taught me how to read noise and power. The logs showed low power (dbmvs were too low at -13 when they should have been around -10), high noise, and lots of packet dropping on one of the channels. Interestingly, I began to suspect that the problem was either my electrical power or something with the Cable company and an electrician. --Call to the Cable Company... I called the cable company and was surprised that none of them could see the same diagnostics. I spoke with Level 3 (the highest tier) of support. They were surprised when I read the values to them. They understood the values and were knowledgeable but none of the Level 3 people's systems included the level of depth that my Netgear router included. Time Warner/Spectrum decided to send someone out to my house. I also was proactive by scheduling an electrician before the visit. --The Electrician. The electrician came out and looked at all my volts, rating the power as excellent (122 to 125), and told me that electricity from my house was definitely not the problem for as small as a unit such as the Netgear cable modem. --The Time Warner/Spectrum Technician This is where it got interesting. He completely rewired everything from my house to the outside connection. Time and time again, his system would show everything was fine but we would test the speed and get less than 100. We tried things out with my old Time Warner/Spectrum Modem and the Netgear Modem. While the old Time Warner Modem showed nothing, my Netgear Modem detected the issues. Eventually, he put his system down and started looking at the diagnostic screen from the Netgear Modem. We both realized that the Netgear diagnostics were more accurate than what the Time Warner/Spectrum team had (and they owned their network)!!!! --And here is where it gets interesting.. Finally, he called one of the backend Time Warner/Spectrum engineers while I was there. He read the values that my Netgear system was giving. The backend Engineer asked for a few moments and checked his system. He came back and said that indeed, the diagnostics showed a "node" failure within the area but that they cannot pinpoint it. To get the speeds that they are getting, the cable providers have been switching to clustered nodes which increases the speed but makes it much harder to pinpoint the exact source of the issue. It appears as though the "speed arms race" has offset the gains with speed with much higher instability as cable providers rush to up the speeds for keeping customers. In other words, the networks are not as stable as they were previously. So, they told me a week ago that they would get back to me when they discovered the problematic node. I haven't heard anything back. I learned one other scary thing. A lot of these cable providers set the speed per a channel. So, if you get 24 channels, you can go up to ultimate 300 but to go to the newly coming ultimate 500, you have to have 32 channels even if the cable modem is capable of going a lot faster. So, it's important to check your default speed per a channel with your provider because there is a race to get up to 1GB currently which will involve a lot of channels. This made my 24 channel modem obsolete... in that ultimate 500 is coming out which requires more channels than this modem as currently 24 channels will only support Ultimate 300. So what is the story here.. why only 4 stars.. The good..---------- * Well, the good was the diagnostics.. I had better diagnostics than the internal Level 3 Spectrum technicians. * The features are so awesome -- you can see who is causing wireless contention and even change the wireless channel to be faster. This especially works out for me because I could even see nearby restaurants causing contention on my wireless channel. The Bad..---------- * The bad was the handling of the internet provider problems, which I suspect has caused some of the reviews. For whatever reason, this modem just doesn't handle problematic nodes like other modems. I can at least use my cheap time warner cable/Spectrum TPLink modem with slower access. I couldn't do anything with the Netgear one. This is a problem because the networks aren't as stable as they were in the past. Having excellent diagnostics is extremely helpful in today's time but I would have liked to see more internal error handling on the cable modem side to at least allow a user to still use the internet. * Spending all this money and getting outdated. Limits of speed per a channel by the cable provider. Now, 24 channels is already outdated. Right now, we have completion coming from AT&T, Time Warner Spectrum, Verizon, and Google Fiber (soon). Customers have choices and this is driving fast rollouts for all the providers without the quality control. Goodness.. It would be a good idea for a cable modem to advertise features such as error handling and what not because it is the reality and a key differentiator. I will return it because 24 channels is now outdated for my provider. But I will get another one when more channels are available. And while it didn't work, it sure did help to finally see where the problem was at. I just wish that I could have got it going but maybe I will. 4 out 5 stars -- excellent features, bad error handling that wasn't their fault completely but should have been handled better (on the level of the other modem).