Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Was excited to get the new x4 router. I upgraded because my R6300 has been dropping quite a bit and the VOIP quality is horrible which had previously been pretty good. Time for a new router. Dynamic QOS sounded really good, I read the manual before buying. It was great on marketing and scant on actual operational details. So was the x6, so went with the x4. Then it arrived, what a nightmare. The short story is that the dynamic QOS is very unintelligent and immensely restrictive. Meaning if it doesn't work well for you, you are stuck and cannot do anything about it because it doesn't let you have control over settings like a normal router. First, with dynamic QOS it tried to figure out "intelligently" what types of applications and devices are connected to your network then prioritize the traffic for ultimate performance. It has a built in DB that has a list of applications and algorithm of how to identify them. You can see the list when you go and name each device (if you want to) and can designate the "type" if you want to (otherwise it figures it out for you so theoretically Netgear thinks you dont need to). This is fine if the Dynamic QOS works well, and this is where the problem lies, serious problems. Nearly all of my applications and devices on my network registered as low priority. The two that registered as high priority really should not have been. Ok, so go change them right? Well, you go to devices on your network and you can rename and classify what type of applications they are from their pre-configured list). Guess what? The list isn't very long and doesn't even have generic VOIP or specific types of VOIP. It doesn't seem to know what VOIP is and you cannot add to that list. I called Netgear as I am thinking "I just spent $280 on a router and it doesn't know what VOIP is and the "intelligent QOS" cannot seem to prioritize basic applications?". Well they confirmed that you are stuck only with the dynamic QOS and have NO control whatsoever to correct prioritization. Further, they also confirmed that the product currently doesn't recognize VOIP of any type, and they are working on a firmware update for this. "Did I just buy a $280 router that doesn't know what VOIP is?" YES, i did. WOW. The x4 doesn't have basic QOS functionality of other routers that would let you manually configure or even tell it to prioritize a specific Ethernet port. Nope, can't do that on the x4 either. This became a bigger issue as looking at my device list (all 16 of them) the intelligent dynamic QOS only recognized 2 of them and put the rest at "low priority" (seemingly when it cannot automatically recognize them, you know like an iphone or macbook because they are so obscure) it just says give it little bandwidth, great. And you are stuck. If you turn off dynamic QOS then you still cannot manually control any of it, at all, either. What does happen is that it treats all devices the same like a router from 10 years ago battling for bandwidth across your network. Yikes. this one is getting returned back to Amazon (sorry amazon, i even read the documentation before I bought it and these limitations were not in there). This router may be for people that have a couple of devices on their network and don't want to think about things but you can do that just as well (if not better) with a router for leess than 30% the cost. This is a fine example where engineering under delivered and marketing over-promised. I am pretty stunned.