Review on 🔁 NETGEAR WAC564 Wireless Mesh Access Point & WiFi Extender - Tri-Band AC3000, High Speed WiFi for 600 Devices, 4x1G Ethernet Ports, MU-MIMO & Insight Remote Management Included by Allen Wagner

I really, really want to give high marks to the WAC564 and WAC540 that I bought as a bundle. Overall they work very well and I love them. However, to set them up online (which is the main benefit) you'll need to use the Insight app on your phone or the Insight website (no web-based device management). In a recent improvement, access to the Insight website is now free for a year, but requires a subscription after that. Controlling devices from your phone can be handy at times, but is often a lot more painful given most phones' limited touch interface. In my case this was not the case at all and phone support was required. I will say their tier 1 support was excellent. Their successful setup eventually required a factory reset of both devices and restarting the setup from scratch. It was frustrating and time consuming but support helped me try other solutions first and factory reset got the devices back to working condition. One of the advertised features is the use of a dedicated frequency spectrum for data transfer between devices. I couldn't activate this configuration in the app and opened a support ticket. Again Tier 1 support was great but was moved to Tier 2 which was quickly moved to Tier 3 where a tech request was opened. And this is where it gets even more depressing. I can only assume that level 3 support is measured by how quickly they close a case. For early interactions, level 3 support kept pinging me if I didn't respond quickly, even after they'd been gone for days to investigate issues. When the techs said they had a solution, I had to close the case even though the solution hadn't been rolled out to my devices yet. After finally realizing that the problem was supposedly just the IOS app, and realizing that the Insight website is now "free" for a year on new devices (this wasn't the case when the support ticket was opened I updated the configuration from the website to see that the configuration is now reported successfully on all devices, but spectrum is still not allocated for backhaul even after restarting access points and clients. So the function still doesn't work. But now level 3 support is again forcing me to close this case and open another for this 'separate' issue with the feature I reported still not working. In short, the devices overall seem really good. Netgear's basic level one support is helpful and effective when you have problems. But my experience with Tier 3 support was so bad that I had to deduct a lot of stars in general and tech support in particular.