Netgear: Horrible Pathetic Bad After-sales Service Atrocious, Awful, deplorable

[miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG 0]

NetGear - supposedly a well-known brand in Netwroking Devices, specially broadband modems and routers. Well, I'm going to reveal to you all, how horribly bad their after-sales service is.

 

So, I have this NetGear DG632 ADSL modem-router connecting me to the world. The product works all fine - except that it has a lousy web-based configuration interface which refuses to come up at times. Just keeps loading and never comes up... anyways, that's not the problem.. The router uses the standard NAT and Port Forwarding to forward various service requests (http, ftp, mail etc.) to various systems on your LAN. Port forwarding for FTP, Mail etc work just fine - but it simply wouldn't work for http requests - for completely unknown reasons.. I've made so many people on this board log onto my ftp/mail server for testing - but none of them could ever reach my http server. It just wouldn't forward the request at all.. So with this problem I contacted their Support.

 

Now their so-called "After-Sales Support" has 2 plans.. one if for free which they "provide" to any netgear product owner and another accelerated blah blah service for people who purchase their service plan. The http issue seemed to be to be a minor problem - plus I had no intentions of buying an expensive support plan for such a little problem - so quite obviously I opted for their free service - which made me register myself using the Serial Number on my router in order to validate myself as an authentic netgear product owner... I did that along with the usual username password blah blah... Next I filed a complaint/support request with exactly the problem I've stated above - that their router wouldn't forward any http requests.

 

In comes an autoresponder mail saying we've received your complaint.. etc.. this is your ticket number..blah... all crap....and that you'll be contacted "soon" by our service representative.. Fine. Their "soon" first turned out to be a week, then two weeks ..and now it's well over a month. I've written to them several times - no response. Nothing. Zilch. Instead - how outrageous can it get - bloody NetGear sends me a mail after a months time, asking me "How was our service against the support request you filed recently? Was it satisfactory.. bad.. etc. Would you care to participate in this online survery to let us know?"

 

Cool, this seemed to me a golden opportunity to plant a hard kick on their back and make them sit straight up & take notice.. So I went ahead and gave them the lowest ratings possible on their survey - and wrote off a very bad review. Even pointed it out to them that when they have NO INTENTION of providing free service to their cutomers, WHY THE HELL do they have that option of free service on their page? They should very well take it off and replace it with Paid-Only service.. at least the customers are not left off wondering about when they are going to be contacted and their problems fixed!!! I ask you What is the NEED of doing all this DRAMA?

 

Anyways - the kind of review I gave them - is enough to make a cherry loose its color. Any customer service department with the faintest vestiges of shame would have immediately contacted me... but THEM?? NOOOO.. they're completely shameless, pathetic .. running out of good adjectives for them... Atrocious I tell you - worse than MAGGOTS.

 

DO NOT EVER BUY A PRODUCT FROM NETGEAR.... COZ IF YOU DO, AND THEN RUN INTO A PROBLEM, YOU'D END UP PAYING 3 TIMES THE PRICE OF YOUR PRODUCT FOR AFTER-SALES SERVICE. I RECOMMEND AGAINST IT VERY VERY STRONGLY. Its your choice...

 

Regards,

m^e

 

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I even went to their forums and posted this same message there with a P.S. which goes like:

P.S. I read their forum TOS - and they might just remove this message - claiming it to be slanderous - if they do so, it just proves my point about their intention of NOT PROVIDING any after sales service for free. But don't worry - that won't stop me. I'm the admin of several tech forums and one that deserves special mention here is http://forums.xisto.com/ forums - where I have an identical copy of this message. Our board is ranked very high on Google and I promise you, within TWO days, this post will be at #1 position. I hate your service that much.

 

Now if they seriously delete my post - they've had it.

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Edited July 2, 2005 by microscopic^earthling (see edit history)

[Ryo 0]

I think the netgear products generally suck.I bought a wireless router form them it works great if you are 10 feet from it. IT is really crappy. I paied 60 bucks for it which i guess is an avrage price and i got ripped off. It also camr with a rebate and since i bought it off line they didnt validate it because my recipt wasn't what they were looking for although that is the only thing that came with the product.DON"T BUY FORM NETGEAR

[sportytalk 0]

Yeah.Someone who lives near me also bought a netgear router and said that he has had nothing but trouble since. After several hours of trying he gave it up as a bad job, requested for a refund and bought an alternative make of a router.When he went out to find a better router, he found one for exactly the same price, but he got a free technical support contract so he was able to telephone the people who know how to set it up and they guided him through the installation.Personally, I don't use netgear and never have done, but I can only say what my friend said. Hopefully, they're not like this really, the company, but with the complaints i've already seen on here, I thought it was quite relevant to post past experiences.Thanks.

[Saint_Michael 3]

well thats good to know and i was contimplating on getting a router from them to but they won't get my $60 dollars HA.Thanks for the head up M^E.