Netgear NETGEAR RAX50-100NAR Nighthawk 6-Stream AX5400 WiFi 6 Router, Black (Renewed)

Refurbished, failed, tech support issues.
Warning: refurbished product. You do save money but you’ll have problems with tech support due to the item being registered under the original owner’s name. The router worked extremely well for two days and then died. I had a difficult time troubleshooting the device due to the item being registered under someone else’s name. The only saving grace is that amazon stands behind this product and is sending me another unit. I will revisit this review and update my experience. As for now, spend the extra money and avoid the headache.

Good hardware, garbage spyware/firmware, works mediocre as WiFi6 WAP
Edit: After installing adguard home on my network and browsing the output, it became clear what a network hog and spyware repository this piece of garbage is, so I removed one of the stars, it’s going in the trash bin, and I’ll never buy another Netgear product again. It’s *CONSTANTLY* pinging home to multiple netgear IP addresses, and when I say constantly, I mean like thousands of times per day. This diseased contagion is off my network for good.First off, the hardware works pretty great, especially for the temporarily discounted price! But I despise the slow, buggy, intolerably annoying firmware. This irritating device *REQUIRES* you to install a privacy-invading phone app, create a netgear account, register your device with them, and only *then* does it allow you to set up the device, and only in the most minimal way. Once you go through the annoyance above, you no longer need the netgear account or phone app, unless you ever need to hard-reset the device. The direct web interface is adequate to set the device up as a WAP (which is why I bought it), but I would not want to use this thing as my main router. The firmware is far too limited, slow, and poorly implemented for it to be a useful router. At the time I bought, it was the cheapest device I could find capable of being a WiFi6 WAP, and it eventually works well in that regard once the irritation of setting it up is over. As an aside/warning, if you set this thing up as a WAP, you’ll want to set up a static IP address in the firmware. I didn’t, and when I connected it to my network, it obtained 3 different DHCP addresses with 3 different MAC addresses, and abandoned them all, then eventually obtained a final one it stuck with. But it only gave the DHCP server its hostname for the first attempt. So, my DNS server thinks the hostname I gave it points at the first attempt, which is abandoned. It took me some sleuthing to find the actual IP address. Also, once you set it to WAP mode, the amazingly incompetent firmware won’t allow you to change any networking settings, so you can’t change it to have a static IP then.Speaking of DNS, once you do get it set up, if you use the DNS name to access it “RAX35” by default, the device immediately redirects your browser to some netgear site. Only by typing in the raw IP address can you access the router config interface. I sort-of solved this by adding a CNAME to my DNS server to point “wwwrouterlogincom” back at the router’s name, and using that DNS name to access it, but that’s a kludge at best.

Great performance and app
By Caleb L12345Pros: This device has performed exceptionally well so far. It’s very easy to set up and connect devices. The Nighthawk app is particularly impressive, offering excellent features such as displaying a list of connected devices. The internet speed is significantly faster compared to my previous Wi-Fi 5 router, which I had used for five years. Additionally, it supports connecting more devices simultaneously without any issues. Cons: The lists of connected devices displayed on the iPad and iPhone apps are inconsistent. Also, it’s not possible to remove some unknown devices from the lists, which can be frustrating.