Review on Renewed NETGEAR Nighthawk Cable Modem CM1200 - Compatible with All Cable Providers, Up to 2 Gigabit Cable Plans, 4 x 1G Ethernet Ports, DOCSIS 3.1, Black by Casey Oliver

I bought a Netgear modem and a Netgear router at the same time. I was able to set them up first. WiFi suddenly stopped working yesterday. Apparently the problem is not with the modem but with the router. My son's computer was connected to the modem with an ethernet cable and his internet was working, but the router was not receiving internet from the modem. After rebooting everything and changing cables several times, I called tech support. After 45 minutes of waiting, the technician assigned to me had me restart everything multiple times as they always do. We then spent 30 minutes with him trying to get me to connect to the internet to download the latest driver from my computer. (By the way, when I set it up and ran it myself, I saw that I already had the latest drivers.) I told him about 15 times that my computer wasn't connected to the internet, but he insisted that and always the same and always end up on the same side of the internal router. I then spent 15 minutes disconnecting and reconnecting the cables, although I changed them a couple of times. He ended up saying to contact someone else and call me back. (He never did.) I plugged in my old Linksys router, which luckily still worked, and did my own research. It turns out that if you have other computers connected directly to the modem, this can prevent the modem from communicating with the router. In our case, my son connected to the modem a week earlier, but he suddenly decided it was a problem. So I restarted everything in the right order and it worked. Two takeaways: (1) the tech support team reads the script and only has two or three sentences and (2) for some reason you shouldn't be using extra ports on your modem to connect computers to the internet, only ports on your router. There is nothing about it in the Netgear literature, nor did the "specialist” know.