Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Well, that's what I ended up doing... paying $300 for this amazing piece of technological excellence. I bought this router over the summer of 2012 for about $199. It was easy to set up and it was working fine. In late October, the firmware got messed up and rendered the R6300 unusable. The PDF user manual said that you must go through Tech Support in order to correct this problem. Well, it just so happened that my period of free Tech Support expired, so I was forced to buy into a contract. I bought the 6-month version for $80. The Tech Support guy fixed my issue - basically I had to download the latest firmware from support.netgear.com in a zip file and upload it to the R6300 via the DOS command window. Well in November, the firmware got messed up again, and I went through this same drill with Tech Support. Problem fixed. In December, the firmware got messed up for a third time. Tech Support fixed it again with the same procedure. However, I demanded a replacement, since my unit was still under warranty. Tech Support instructed me to ship my unit to them in Tennessee, and after they received it, they'd send me a new one. That would take at least a few weeks. Well, "that sucks," I thought, because I'd be out of a router for at least half-a-month or more. My wife and I work at home, and we needed our network to be fully functional. Tech Support gave me an option. I could pay them $17, and they would FedEx a replacement R6300 to me. Upon receipt, I would have to ship back my faulty unit. I guess they basically had me by the gonads, so I bought in to this. Makes wonder why I had to fork over $17 for Netgear to ship me a new unit first. Why couldn't they just ship it to me for free, and I send back my original unit afterward. They'd have my credit card on file and could easily bill me for the cost of an R6300 if I failed to ship a unit back to them. So, here we are folks... ($199 for the purchase price) + ($80 for 6 months of Tech Support) + ($17 for them to ship me a replacement unit) .... About $300 for the cost of the Netgear R6300 router. Was it worth it??? Well, the new unit, which is about two weeks old by now, is dropping the network connection at random times. The first unit had firmware problems. This new unit has connection problems. I guess I should buy shares of Netgear, huh? It's a pretty good scam they have set up to sucker customers into buying faulty products then gouging them with Tech Support fees. By the way, I was at Fry's Electronics over the weekend looking at other routers. I saw a couple of guys looking at the Netgear R6300. I told them my story, and both of them promptly put their boxes back on the shelf and picked up the ASUS RT-AC66U, then walked over to the cash registers. I guess I did my good deed for the day there, and I felt all warm and fuzzy inside. Sorry Netgear shareholders... I just chased off two potential revenue sources for you guys. I think I'll be doing a lot more "good deeds" from now on. :)