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I realize this update is quite small, but the changelog isn't exhaustive, and we do have big updates on the way. Keep an eye out next week because we're planning a blog post that will reveal some exciting information about our plans for the next milestone.

Read Derren Brown's book 'Happy"' if you have not already. Lots about just what you were taking about, and taking a more stoic approach to life. After all no point in getting upset about things you can't control, yes you can debate and think about them but not to the point they stress you out, or you start feeling depressed or fixated let alone angry. Life is to short to worry about lumps of metal and plastic of any kind.

Leave it alone unless you are having issues with voip.

This. I broke my own vow to not buy another Netgear product when I saw this router come out. I thought, "Hey, someone else doing the software!!! Cool, maybe I can rely upon this 3rd party to keep the system up to date." The jury is in. Nope. Another abandoned Netgear product. Shame on me.

Well we are now getting close to the end of another month and no firmware updates. Im also getting close to my end of warranty now. That means since I purchased this router ive had one firmware update in almost one full year! That's right! That means one firmware update and zero patches or fixes along the way! zero nada! This really is beyond thinkable.. This next firmware update better be damn perfect! If we don't get support with the next drop im done and selling this as well. I will give this a chance but very little wiggle room.. I cant even wrap my head around this to believe there has been zero patches to known issues for so long. But I guess they did say the Titanic was unsinkable and that it was one big lifeboat herself! Well we all know how that turned out! Zippy.

New Features and Enhancements: Support France Free and Orange ISP of the IPTV configuration. Support GUI login weak password protection. Bug Fixes: Fixes security vulnerability issues. Fixes the issue that cannot detect and prioritize game traffic of Fortnite Fixes the issue that in traffic prioritization, it can't detect "league of legend" traffic and some other pc games, such as Apex Legend, Monster Hunter and Rainbow Six Siege. Fixes the issue that the speedtest download speed result will be limited at 500Mbps Firmware Update Instructions: Download Link : http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/XR500/XR500-V2.3.2.56.zip

For anyone updating to this firmware don't forget to back up your current configuration just incase you run into issues you will find the back up config option under Settings - Administration - Backup Settings. Although I still have to update my firmware looking at these patch notes im very disheartened A lot of us where hoping for firmware milestone 1.4 or at least some major fixes for the issues we are all having The last real firmware update was around December the 13th last year is this really what weve been waiting this long for??

The thing is just that the ISP can't always help it. I am in the Netherlands at the moment playing on my 250/25 cable connection and normally I connect to Vultr in Amsterdam. Today though I had a unknown host designated as peer. Turns out this is Internap cloud services in Amsterdam. I had some ping spikes and I ran a pingplotter log out of curiosity. As you can see on the picture, the actual bufferbloat occurs on the Internap Corporation network. Also there is another carrier between my ISP and Internap and that is Cogentco. When I connect to Choopa/Vultr that is not there. Instead its ISP -> NTT -> Vultr. So a 2 different game servers in the same city with a totally different routing. Some ISP's might specialize in low latency for gaming but if the backbone that they use has one bad hop it can already screw you over.

The R7000 was a good router that suffered at the hands of bad updates for the longest time. After adding the Arlo stuff and removing it the router never felt 'whole' again for a long time, and there were so many complaints on forum about it. The R7800 has so far been one of Netgears best router based on just netgears own firmware, but that's been buggy of late with high ping spikes in 5Ghz and attached devices not working properly even with Voxels great fork. Also no real updates to that router either for a long time, and QoS on the R7800 has not been updated since 2017 as Qualcomm has given up on Streamboost. Right now is not the time to buy Wi-Fi 6 gear either as its based on draft 3 not the final ratified version and next year we will see new silicon that can take full advantage of the final draft at the end of the year, rather like wave 2 for Wi-Fi 5. Yes this XR500 router is unusual and has had its fair share of bugs since I got one as a beta tester and a later launch model. (without the messed up port printing on the back) However looking over the forums I don't think the XR500 is any worse than the R7000 for issues with firmware tbh. Googling R7000 Netgear router bugs bring up a lot of unhappy users and bug info. I hope the long gap means Netgears management has finally got a grip of the lousy firmware that was being written for very good hardware. When three separate firmware devs in Taiwan all are using different versions of the same code for routers, so the XR500 had a later version of OpenSSL compared to the R7800 which had a newer version than the R9000 which has a really outdated version but was the flagship at the time, it boggles the mind (no wonder the XR700 is buggy as its a R9000 warts and all.) Apart from making it known we don't like this practice and voting with our wallets there is nothing we can do. So its either move on or just realise this is the way of modern life and find a good third party firmware from the likes of Voxel or Merlin and many others who take time and have pride in their work. As long as you don't mind maybe not always having the latest Wi-Fi drivers all is good unless you brick the router, and then you are on your own as Netgear don't support using third party firmware as far as I know. DumaOS when working as it should is a great OS (because its not created by a multinational company and they take great pride too) but they need full IPv6 support I will say. I may not like the length between patches one bit for Netgear's DumaOS routers, but that is more to do with Netgear than Netduma I imagine. Netgear really dumbs down their interface, maybe so they can avoid support calls as someone I know mentioned elsewhere. Asus make great firmware (Merlin based) but some of their hardware has been lacking and the number or times radios have failed even on the RT-AC86U which is a great router is quite surprising. You will never find perfect hardware or firmware or the perfect OS, it doesn't exist and if you are looking for it you will just drive yourself mad.

All software has bugs every router, every phone, every TV every operating system. It’s impossible to have tens of thousands to millions of lines of code and not have bugs or now and then regressions. Netgear is not the only company that has issues believe me. Sonys android firmware for their TVs is buggy beyond belief and if you bought an OLED TV in 2018 you actually bought 2015 hardware which is now out of date. This is the world we live in nothing is ever perfect but each update will bring something new to the table and maybe some bugs. The longer it’s tested the better chance we have of a good and stable final release and even though I have been one of the ones complaining I am well aware after many years of beta testing firmware and hardware that patience is at the end of the day is the only thing we have, we can’t control who writes the firmware we can’t control the company that publishes it, we just see how it turns out when released.

Special people don't have it, 99% of the consumers do not have this, only a few testers that have been testing with Netgear for a long time. We don't decide who tests Netgear routers, that is up to them. Once a firmware has passed all tests then it will be released. Part of the testing is endurance testing which means it must run for a certain amount of time without rebooting, turning off, disconnecting itself etc. That is just one part of the tests and that in itself takes a long time. I understand your frustration but please be patient, I imagine you'd rather a firmware that works but takes a little longer to be released than one that doesn't but is released quickly.

Easy Nukes bo4? Raise your KD? HOW TO? gun: mx9 att: extramag + longbarrel + fmj equim: acoustic sensor perks: engenr + gung-ho + dead silence Turn on your netduma!!!

I disagree. It is something every company "can" do. Not every company "will" do is the proper response. You guys have the resources to push support faster than a snails pace, but you choose not to. It isn't a matter of can or can't. Its a matter of choice. There are many companies that can compile hundreds of gigabytes of data a year into a program or game. How much more complex can a few megabytes in a firmware be? Is there only 1 guy doing all the work? Why? Greed? Share the wealth and grow your company by employing more staff. Find the bottleneck and fix it. You are bleeding reputation. reputation=profit.

Update on packet loss issues mentioned above: with tech appt. scheduled, ISP line crew manager called me (to my surprise) to let me know they were working on a local, physical issue affecting a number of customers (node maybe?), thus my appt. would be unnecessary, and that he would call me to let me know when they're done. Sorry to clutter up thread with what turned out to be some very off topic posts.

There is an update being tested at the moment so hopefully that will be released soon. I realise it is frustrating but very frequent updates isn't something every company can do and for something as important as a router it's vital to not hurry out updates.

I'm also having similar issues I play COD bo4, when I have qos on! my bullets turns into marshmallow and when I turn it off it feels really good Which makes no sense at all, it felt liked it worked way better on the r1, I'm frustrated with all this issues, first I had the r1 early adopter and was pushed to upgrade just because the r500 gets dumaos before r1 and now it feels like I downgraded. I'm about to but the Asus RT-AC88U and see if it's less headache to work with. Don't get me wrong I love all the ideas of dumaos but I really feel like the developer were more productive when they were starting the company compare to now.

You will never get this totally right. A Netduma router or any other router with QoS can only control traffic outgoing at your own network and there is stops. Netduma/DumaOS also have the option to use a geofilter to limit connections, that's where you get the major advantage over other brands. First of all, there is no dedicated servers in CoD in true sense of the word. A true dedicated server is an actual physical server dedicated to running the hosting software and has it's own internet connection. What we call dedicated servers in CoD is a program running in a cloud, this cloud has multiple access nodes which all have their own traffic load, and the cloud itself is running numerous other programs requiring internet bandwidth and prioritization levels. So performance of the hosting/server program is reliant on total usage of the cloud it's running in and total bandwidth usage of the cloud. If you have ever seen a complex like this, my place in Europe is close to a Microsoft datacenter, and the place is massive. You're easily talking over 10 football fields long and wide, having over 25 warehouse sized buildings containing their serverpark. So you can imagine it doesn't get it's internet through a single UTP cable, there is multiple fiberoptic backbones coming in. It has actually happened that I was connected to the same server complex. DumaOS showed 41ms ping. Game finishes, next game loads, I am playing on another uplink on the same servercomplex and ping read 33ms. So we can already see that their servers themselves are inconsistent. Before I continue, this is a good basis read: http://denkirson.proboards.com/thread/5972/networking-lag-compensation-hit-detection I think it's posted here before but it's a good foundation as to why there is issues and what is this terrible lag comp people on the internet talk about. Traffic coming from your router doesn't go straight to the server, but first has to cross your ISP's network. From there it goes on one or more backbones owned by a third party. From there, it usually gets connected up to a internet exchange, a place where these backbones meet and a lot of high end serverparks have a very close connection to these places, or are directly plugged in. On every segment, the owner of the network sets his own traffic shaping and prioritization ques. One of the largest Internet Exchanges in Europe is AMS-IX. For reference you can see how much traffic they process: https://stats.ams-ix.net/index.html What is funny here is that you can see exactly what peak time is for internet usage and peak load on the backbones and the network. Beginning at your ISP. Your ISP is usually oversubscribed factor 100 to factor 500. They expect their customers to use their internet in bursts so they can sell the same bandwidth multiple times if you want to call it that. Or another way of putting it. I live in a town with about 50.000 households covered by my ISP. I have 300/300 bandwidth. So if everybody had that and fired up their speedtest website, the ISP has to have 15Tb of bandwidth to my town alone, that's simply not happening. As you can see in the link above, the actual AMS-IX roughly has a 6 Tb/s throughput. Since they don't have this amount of bandwidth, the ISP has to deal with bandwidth management and they do this by something called traffic shaping. They have multiple traffic ques for different types of traffic, each having their own priority level. My ISP in Europe for example, they offer free VOIP between customers. You don't want this to be laggy, so this will be prioritized highest. Furthermore, the ISP's believe that a regular customer will simply spend most time downloading stuff, surfing the internet and watch streaming content etc. Their traffic shaping algorithms are optimized towards that. You can tell simply by the fact that download is much higher than upload on most residential connections. So while traffic is filling their traffic ques, the shaping algorithm decides what to send out and what to buffer. When the buffer is full, traffic simply gets dropped (the idea behind bufferbloat as often discussed on these forums) Gaming traffic is UDP traffic. And generally is just one way traffic. One reason why a ISP likes to put UDP traffic in the very lowest priority que, is that when a packet is dropped it is simply ignored after, the sender simply sends the next packet. TCP on the other hand, sends a packet, awaits confirmation from the receiver and then sends the next. So if the original sender doesn't get this confirmation, it will simply resend the packet. This is why network operators choose to drop or delay UDP traffic. Once it's gone it's gone. TCP traffic will be resend over and over and if there is any sort of congestion issue dropping TCP packets will simply make this worse. Also, since different traffic has different priorities, you have to look at how ping is calculated in game or by a website etc. Is it physically sending a ICMP request, or does it do what sites like DSL reports do, send a HTTP get request and time how long it takes to get an answer? These things are all different. Point being here is that while you can have a great ping in game, it's a different traffic class than UDP gaming traffic. So while your ping might look great, your gaming traffic can be lagging all over the place since this is qued and buffered differently. When your traffic arrives at the backbone, largely the same thing will happen, your traffic is prioritized and gaming traffic is once again in the lowest tier. Every hop to the server will have it's own traffic ques and traffic shaping schemes. All the way up to the server complex. So this lag comp people speak of? Following the above. Latency for UDP traffic can be very different than ping suggests but can also be more unstable due to buffering etc. What is more annoying, is that it can also be asymmetric. Since most ISP's provide asymmetrical connections, their traffic shaping model across their network will follow a similar model. What's happening when the famous "Lag comp is against me" occurs? Your real-time UDP latency on download is higher than on your upload to the server. If you have read the article about lag compensation at the start, it will be obvious by now. When this occurs, your traffic reaches the server faster than you are gettig the gamestate updates from the server. And thus you will appear at your enemies screen before they appear on yours. And they seem to shoot you in a nanosecond. Some players try to influence this by clogging their upload on purpose, so they delay upload to the server. Fine example of exactly this happening to me a few days ago: You can see he was clearly not on the screen when I was taking damage. This mainly why you get a different feel for the connection every time you play, or even from game to game or half way the game. You can control your own network, but next to you and the host, there is at least 3 other different parties involved who have a influence on the quality of your traffic. It makes me chuckle when some Youtuber connects up router A and afterwards router B and decides on feel that one or the other is better because he had a slightly faster hit detection in one of the games. Also, when you are setting up your network, and follow the directions for setting up anti-bufferbloat, you're simulating a fully loaded internet connection. Most of the time when playing, this is not the case. When I play CoD and I have my DumaOS screen open, I generally have a traffic load of 0.5 Mb/s on a 300/300 Mb/s connection. Bufferbloat is absolutely not going to be an issue no matter what you set the sliders to. When is all this important? QoS and anti bufferbloat is simply important if you have a low upload connection, or better said low compared to your usage. On a connection with 10/20 Mb/s upload, a phone simply syncing can already congest your network. This is where you need to have your bufferbloat and QoS set up right. If you are using a 1000/1000 Mb/s connection this is of very little interest. QoS will do very little for you here. You read about people complaining that they are using 1000/1000 Mb/s internet and still have a crappy game. Thats simply because traffic coming from their network is simply still affected by traffic shaping between their ISP, backbone and server and this is not any different than any other connection. Geofilter is the prime functionality for R1 and DumaOS routers for me. It simply makes sure that you are connected to the closest server. I measured ping across Europe. To Amsterdam I get 8ms, to Italy 28ms. If you were to have a game that was truly having 28ms latency, it would be perfectly playable. It's only that from Amsterdam to Italy, there is so many extra hops in the traffic route that the chance of you meeting over congestion is exponentially growing. As geofiltering limits your matchmaking, you have to find a balance here between connectivity and quality. Typically in Europe I have Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London in my filter giving 8-15ms ping. Paris for some odd reason gives 25ms and always has a lower game quality. I have friends that use R1 routers and mess about with the sliders every day and they can never get it right either. That's because it's impossible to get it right and it's all pissing in the wind. If you have a setting that gives you a clean line without bufferbloat, then you did all you can do and the rest is simply out of your hands. Other settings? DNS, MTU? Is all BS. Set it to what your provider defaults and done. It's all snake oil. I swapped my XR500 for my R1 once to do some testing, forgot to update the connection setting in the PS4 and it was pointing to a non functional DNS adress. And the game ran fine. I only found out because I went to upload a video afterwards and it was coming up with DNS errors. So conclusion here is also it doesn't matter which DNS you use.

Last update from Netgear 18th December 2018 Fraser, thats taking the proverbial p*ss as I see it. Sorry I cant see the XR router range as viable at this point, especially as the R7800 (same SoC) received a beta security update last month and the XR500 has not. I find that concerning as what effect's the R7800 effects the XR500 as they are the same hardware CPU and switch wise.

This is going to sound crazy but ive set both my sliders to one percent giving me 0.4 upload and 3.8 download, ive tested this for two nights now in a row and ive never had hit detection and smoothness like this since the game launched. if i leave my connection full bung or even setting sliders to the 70/70 its not good at all im constantly feeling like im being lagged and behind, which has left me super frustrated as of late with this game. After toying with slider setting and setting it so low, i keep dropping people so easy its like crisp detection is back, so many variables and two nights testing it could be a fluke but i will keep it this way till i feel something has changed. it just feels so good to instamelt people back again.

Thanks Fraser and everybody for your help much appreciated 😊

I like these ideas a lot! We're aware of how useful these features would be... And i'll make sure the devs know that people really want this.

Thanks alot guys! I ended up taking DMZ off...turning UPNP back on and leaving my ports forward and leaving my address reservation static and reset everything and got a open nat and I can tell the hitmarks are alot better and the game in general is playing better. Thanks again for the help!

Netgear routers label port scans and almost all traffic as DoS attacks it seems, they are very paranoid as far as logs, and its totally normal. This is the noise of the internet, as I said none are Dos Attacks, and the fact the firewall dropped the packets is good anyway. Port scans are done all the time and most of this is probably normal traffic the router does not like. Don't worry about it, its normal. If it was a Dos attack you would not be posting. My logs look the same, in fact every Netgear router I have ever had has logs like this.

Thank you soooo much for the help it worked.

You guys are amazing, that did the trick. Thanks for such quick replies. Here I was thinking about more complicated issues and it was a simple cache clear.

Super sa! J'ai vu Free aussi du coup mode Bridge fonctionnel avec la TV peut être ? Ou peut être qu'on peut la retirer aussi même si j'en doute ahah.

It’s a netgear router that runs DumaOS as well, netgear update the router as it’s their hardware. It needs updates from netgear to patch security holes and to update drivers which netduma can’t do with DumaOS on this router as it’s not their hardware. Also it was a turn of phrase too, because there were things that needed fixing in the netgear side of it while netduma work on milestone 1.4

@Buckeye Purple I figured as much. I do see those prediction symbols and pisses me off and teleporting enemies. I know Respawn has shit servers and codes but you'd think months go by they would fix it.

Thanks. This is actually quite helpful; I'll take a look and see if the PLA has any user configurable options that I may have missed. Guessing this is a model-specific issue, as others here have used other brands of PLAs. May be a useful item to add to future lab/R&D tests 😉 Have a good one!

Hi Derlandes - I can assure you that we aren't going to abandon any DumaOS powered router for the foreseeable future. There is a lot happening behind the scenes, and it will all make sense soon enough. We're currently in a heavy development period, and all platforms will soon see the benefits

I see nothing wrong with adding solos if thats what folk want, the good thing is it will stop people crying over team mates they say suck, so it will all be on you no more carrying lol. What about everyone selecting gibraltar with his ultimate going off everywhere lol im sure it will be a blast!! With the previous track record in this game lord knows what this upcoming patch will break in the game with the solo addition, im quietly hoping the new patch finally addresses the packet loss on all their servers its been really frustrating lately dealing with that.

@Zippy This arrogant disregard of people's time is pandemic among the larger tech companies. I didn't spend a bunch of money on a router only to have to spend 40+ hours of time screwing around with it trying to get it to work; but the bottom line is king, and actually testing products before releasing them on the public affects the bottom line. I wish reviewers focused more on performance and reliability rather than features, but then that might affect their bottom lines.

Very strange that this would occur on the XR300 but not on the XR500. I'm going to investigate.

Netduma work hard but none of the promises for the XR500 have materialised from back in March 2018. No new icons for device manager, no GUI fix for Hybrid VPN undefinedB' 0.0 KiB in r-apps even in the Hotfix nothing was fixed in the GUI. Netduma had enough time to fix that GUI issue, also they said that Hybrid VPN would be turned off in the next update, well that didn't happen either nor did the "yes we will add a retest your speed button" which was promised along time before milestone 1.3 was released. Both sides are guilty here to a degree I would have to say.

Trying to find the right settings seem next to impossible since there’s so many variables that affect connection! It’s frustrating when every time you think you have the right settings and good gameplay, it goes South for no apparent reason. Testing on PingPlotter while saturating line using Speedtest, I get stable connection. While my line is idle (or at least console not turned on), my line is stable. As soon as I get into lobbies, I get pretty big, choppy spikes and depending on the room, shoot first die first. This is with the R1, using DumaOS & playing BO4. While in game, I’ll change my sliders around to see any difference since that rules out changing of lobbies, players etc, which can influence the outcome. Doesn’t seem to matter if I use port forwarding, UPNP, IPV6 etc.......tried all different combinations & still get inconsistent results. Again, my ISP & line seem to be stable, it’s just “in game” that’s the issue. My modem is new & all my hardware is spot on. Some people make it look & sound so easy but there’s so many factors that I feel are out of our control, even with the Duma. What are your thoughts, experiences? I know higher speeds shouldn’t matter but I’m trying it anyways. Going from 200/10 up to 400/20 with Spectrum. Thanks for any and all input!

Well, it turns out I've managed to fix it, in a round about kind of way. I'm using a DM200 Modem with the XR500. If you want the DM200 to handle the VLAN settings, instead of the XR500, you have to set them up when the modem is in Modem/Router mode and then change it to modem only and do not allow VLAN passthrough. After hours of frustration, I'm just glad I've managed to figure this out.

Im sorry but i agree with Killhippie stop taking the proverbial p*ss The XR range has been a Hindrance since day one most of the features that where advertised where broken and they still are We all believed you guys when you told us you where going to fix it and thats why people have waited all this time and now we are all out of warranty If you guys cant offer the said fixes by a due date you should honour that you have sold a duff product and offer everyone a refund

More the reason why it should be fully supported in the next firmware update

If there is an issue it will likely present itself on the interface or on the connection and then we can get the user to grab the logs for us, there shouldn't be any issues that are not obviously apparent and just show in the logs. I can ask the developers to post a breakdown of common log entries so people can better understand them.

Yes its the ping from you to the server and thats all you can control so wouldn't worry too much about the in game ping.

Yeah that high priority traffic is buggy for me as well what about flashing the XR500 with DD-WRT instead of selling it?

Ok I'll do those things and see what happens.

Why would you think people would not want to use IPv6 when its the latest networking protocol to replace IPv4 and is now running on most ISP's at least in the UK and many in the USA i'm sure.? My ISP, IDNet has had it for over 5 years now.

I can appreciate that. Well, here's hoping that one of your devs sees the suggestion and adds it to the backlog.

I think it would be extremely useful if I could view a list of connections within the past 24 hours so that I don't miss any connections that I need to blacklist. Adding extra information such as ping, send/recieve rate plus distance would be amazing.

the ping will be you to the server or host. The only true way to know your ping is through running a ping test through cmd prompt, pingplotter or speedtest.net they will all give you your actual base ping.

that is fine, no need to worry. I cannot remember exactly why but Netduma did comment on this in another thread some while ago. All I know is it nothing for you to worry about.

I was having the exact same issue. Clearing the browser of the last 4 weeks did the trick.

Hi. Have you tried clearing the browser cache?