In the last 8 months, I’ve started spending a significant amount of time in hotels (mostly Marriott, but occassionally Hilton). For reasons unbeknown to me, Marriott hotels continue to only provide ethernet based internet services in their rooms. I of course, being a techie road warrior, bought the Netgear WGR101 travel router so that I could get wireless in my room.
Given my past experiences with Netgear, I had assumed that this router would also be fairly decent. Boy was I wrong… The supposed multi-user mode (a very important feature to anyone who needs to sync both a laptop as well as a PDA) is in fact non-operational. This problem, a firmware problem that affects ALL WGR101, has been brought to the attention of Netgear by many different users through both their support personnel as well as Netgear’s support forum (PDF in case they try to delete the thread).
Netgear of course, has decided to ignore this matter (which a very simple firmware upgrade could have fixed). To make things worse, they have even responded to my BBB complaint with non-sensical responses:
On March 24, 2006, the business provided the following information:
Contact Name and Title: ********* (QA Manager)
Contact Phone: ***.***.****
We cannot locate the customer in our system as a registered owner of this product. We will need further information (i.e. Serial Number of the product)We will also need to get the purchase date, where he purchased the product since we are not a direct seller of our products. Until then we will not be able to initiate our investigation.
As I mentioned in my BBB complaint (shown below), this is a firmware issue that affects ALL users of this model. Whether I registered my router, or where I bought it.. is completely irrelevant to the issue and absolutely does not affect whether they can initiate their investigation.
Complaint filed by: Ming Jack Po
Complaint filed against: NetGear Inc.
Complaint status: Forward Business response to Consumer
Case Description: Netgear Model WGR-101 currently does NOT perform as advertised. It’s stated Multi-user mode (MUM) does not work at all…. (More) Netgear Model WGR-101 currently does NOT perform as advertised. It’s stated Multi-user mode (MUM) does not work at all. The problem is very well documented by many different customers who have bought this product (including me) on their own website: http://forum1.netgear.com/support/viewtopic.php?t=11376&highlight=wgr101 http://forum1.netgear.com/support/viewtopic.php?p=102777#102777 Unfortunately, netgear has pretended the problem does not exist, or is simply refusing to fix this issue. one of the main reason that I got this modem was for multi-user travel mode.. and now it’s essentially dead weight.
I am going to follow up with Netgear on the BBB issue, and let’s see whether Netgear fixes its act.
UPDATE: Well, after much wrangling back and forth.. it turns out Netgear is sticking with its story that nothing is wrong..!
Dear Jack,
I have tested the WGR101 with the Firmware 1009 with a DSL connection with Dynamic IP and DNS Configurations. It worked fine especially in Multi-user Mode without any issues. For Further help I would request you to call our Technical Support Line 1-888-NETGEAR for troubleshooting.
Regards
Rajiv
Netgear Support
Really? It works fine? So EVERYONE in the forums is just lying? I guess I’m taking Netgear off my list of companies I will do business with…
