XR700 Thoughts and Questions

[FQs19]

So I picked up the XR700 because I loved the fact that it has 6 lan ports and 1 SFP+ port which you can use as a 10gb, 1gb, 100mb, or 10mb lan port or a 10gb wan port. 

It also destroys the capabilities of the R1 in terms of wifi and power. I'm sure the R1 will do great with DumaOS, but I needed something that could use all of my 1GB internet speeds. 

I've been with Netduma for a long time (Early Adopter with the R1), and I've also been waiting a long, long time for DumaOS. 

Was it worth the wait, I can't say for sure because I haven't tested all aspects of it yet, but I can say that I'm extremely happy with this router so far. 

The wifi is outstanding, it has plenty of horsepower for whatever you need, setup is a breeze (if you set it up connected to the internet and don't set it up Offline that is), there's Hybrid VPN and Plex Server if you use them, but most of all it is a super R1 with the geo-filter, best-in-class QoS, 1gb speeds, and 802.11AD wireless. It's the dream of all of us Early Adopters. Congrats Netduma on this product! You guys have come a long way!

 

I do have some thoughts about it that I wanted to share before I forget.

First, I usually always set up my routers Offline. It's just a habit, mostly cause routers always want to have a lan address of 192.168.1.1 and I have at least 3 routers on my network at once. So there's always a conflict if I don't set them up offline and change their lan ip address first. When I tried to set this up Offline, I had some issues with the Setup Wizard not working correctly since it wanted to be online. I got past those issues, but then somehow the XR700 knew there was a dhcp router on my network and changed it's lan ip address to 10.0.0.1 without notifying me of the change. 

Second, Netgear says you can use routerlogin.net to access the interface, but I have Verizon Fios internet and their router, the G1100, also uses that same address to access it's interface. So that's a conflict you need to work around. You have to disconnect the routers, change the lan/wan ip addresses, then reconnect them so you can use their specific ip addresses to access their respective interfaces. Most users won't have this issue and those that do will understand networking enough to work around it. 

Third, not sure if this is a bug on the new 1.0.1.2 firmware or not, but when I was going through the Setup Wizard and tried to set both the 2.4 and 5ghz wireless networks to the same SSID, it said I couldn't. After I finished the Setup Wizard, I went into the wireless network settings and found that it had set both the 2.4 and 5ghz wireless networks to the same SSID. Strange for sure. 

Fourth, there's an issue with accessing the DumaOS interface with different PCs. Each PC will show different settings. The R1 did this with the 1.03.g firmware. I hope this is an issue that can get resolved. I use Chrome on two PCs and one Macbook Pro. 

Fifth, the lan port leds are supposed to either be White or Amber and either Solid or Blinking according to the manual.

 Well, I have my PS4 Pro and my Xbox Scorpio connected to lan ports 1 and 2 respectively, and when the consoles are off or in standby mode, the leds are Red. 

When I turn the consoles on, the leds turn White. So it seems that either Netgear's Amber is Red or Netgear forgot to add the Red led color description in their manual. Both of my consoles are set for Standby mode, so they drop their link rate to 10mb or 100mb when in standby. Just not sure if Netgear's Amber is Red or not. Haha. 

 All said, I'm very happy with the XR700 so far and I'm looking forward to Ping Assist and Jitter Reduction in the future since they're not in the current DumaOS 1.0.1.2 firmware on the XR700.  

I have yet to play any online games but I will update this post when I do. 

Congrats again Netduma! 

Thank you for showing Router manufacturers that us Gamers need better hardware and software, and that if they build it, we will buy it. 

[crunkjuice1]

Congratulations on the score of that router! Where did you buy it? Was it a pre order? I see on Amazon they keep pushing it back. 

If your consoles have auto update when the console is off or standby mode it makes the lights turn that color. Turn off those features and see if the lights go completely out. 

Again congrats on that beast. 

[FQs19]

Thanks. 

I pre-ordered it from Amazon.com on the first day it was listed. Received it Saturday. 

The Red light goes off when there's no activity coming from the consoles. 

It's just strange that they didn't mention the Red color in their manual.  

[crunkjuice1]

Cool. I guess the unicorn does exist! I had the xr700 bug bad but saw the date move back twice so I got over it. You are tempting me though lol. The light color has been something that takes place since I have had my netgear X8. I think there has been two to four more models since the X8 was launched. Regardless once you are setup hitting the xr700 hard with use at its highest hit can you post how much the CPU's % in usage is? The xr500 with what is a lot for my house at least gets about 50% 

[FQs19]

9 minutes ago, crunkjuice1 said:

Cool. I guess the unicorn does exist! I had the xr700 bug bad but saw the date move back twice so I got over it. You are tempting me though lol. The light color has been something that takes place since I have had my netgear X8. I think there has been two to four more models since the X8 was launched. Regardless once you are setup hitting the xr700 hard with use at its highest hit can you post how much the CPU's % in usage is? The xr500 with what is a lot for my house at least gets about 50% 

It averages 50% when I'm streaming two 4k hdr videos, a 1080p video, and doing a speed test, with a spike in usage to 80% during the speed test. 

Most of the time I see it around 25%. 

[crunkjuice1]

Although I have the xr500 I see a xr700 in the future! 😜😜🤣🤣

[Guest Killhippie]

At £490 it would have to make a three course dinner and kiss me after, thats a crazy price for a router.

[FQs19]

2 hours ago, Killhippie said:

At £490 it would have to make a three course dinner and kiss me after, thats a crazy price for a router.

And some people would rather drive an Audi than a Hyundai. 

To each, their own. 

[Netduma Admin]

Thanks for the write-up! Was great to read your comments.

Could you explain this one a little more please:

Quote

Fourth, there's an issue with accessing the DumaOS interface with different PCs. Each PC will show different settings. The R1 did this with the 1.03.g firmware. I hope this is an issue that can get resolved. I use Chrome on two PCs and one Macbook Pro. 

Do you have an example?

Your other questions are about NETGEAR hardware stuff, which we're not obviously as clued up on. If you need help with any of it, you can get hold of them here: https://www.netgear.com/support/contact.aspx - but because you're tech-savvy it sounds like you're on top of everything anyway. The red light thing is weird - could it be that it's the solid Amber light (restricted to 100mbps), but it's just appearing more reddish than expected.

Very happy to hear you are enjoying it anyway.

[FQs19]

2 minutes ago, Netduma Admin said:

Thanks for the write-up! Was great to read your comments.

Could you explain this one a little more please:

Do you have an example?

Your other questions are about NETGEAR hardware stuff, which we're not obviously as clued up on. If you need help with any of it, you can get hold of them here: https://www.netgear.com/support/contact.aspx - but because you're tech-savvy it sounds like you're on top of everything anyway. The red light thing is weird - could it be that it's the solid Amber light (restricted to 100mbps), but it's just appearing more reddish than expected.

Very happy to hear you are enjoying it anyway.

Sure, if I look at the Geo-filter on one of my PCs, I will set it for 500mi with it located around Pennsylvania, and zoomed-in at 2.5 to show the US, Mexico, and Europe. 

If I use my Macbook Pro to show that same Geo-filter page, it will be set to 2000mi with it located around Oregon, and zoomed all the way out, showing the whole world. 

It seems like every Chrome browser saves those pages individually on their respective computers. 

The original R1 firmware did the same thing. 

So for every Chrome browser I use, I have to individually set certain pages, like the Geo-filter and the QoS settings. 

 

I will contact Netgear if I have a hardware question I can't figure out. 

I think that the light is supposed to be Amber, but it's actually more red. It also depends on the room lighting and view angle. 

[Guest Killhippie]

Just now, FQs19 said:

And some people would rather drive an Audi than a Hyundai. 

To each, their own. 

Yes each to their own but  still a ridiculous price for a router in my own view, especially when online gaming use about 1mb''s worth of bandwidth. but its got a great red stripe so you know its fast and plex is great those that need it. 802.11ad is not really used by anything much at all, I mean the R9000 (XR700  is a R9000 with DumaOS) was released in 2016 and 802.11ad has not really been taken off taken since then. Also with AX routers and WPA3 coming next year it seems a bit limited already, as it cant be updated to support 802.11ax hopefully it will get WPA3 but we will have to wait and see along with the X500 on that front. Anyway enjoy, I'm sure its a great device.

[Netduma Admin]

1 hour ago, FQs19 said:

Sure, if I look at the Geo-filter on one of my PCs, I will set it for 500mi with it located around Pennsylvania, and zoomed-in at 2.5 to show the US, Mexico, and Europe. 

If I use my Macbook Pro to show that same Geo-filter page, it will be set to 2000mi with it located around Oregon, and zoomed all the way out, showing the whole world. 

It seems like every Chrome browser saves those pages individually on their respective computers. 

The original R1 firmware did the same thing. 

So for every Chrome browser I use, I have to individually set certain pages, like the Geo-filter and the QoS settings. 

 

I will contact Netgear if I have a hardware question I can't figure out. 

I think that the light is supposed to be Amber, but it's actually more red. It also depends on the room lighting and view angle. 

Anything that is a physical setting should be retained across devices. For example, distance radius and home location. 

Something visual, like how zoomed in you are, should not be. 

Double check if this is happening again if you can please.

[FQs19]

10 minutes ago, Netduma Admin said:

Anything that is a physical setting should be retained across devices. For example, distance radius and home location. 

Something visual, like how zoomed in you are, should not be. 

Double check if this is happening again if you can please.

So, the actual location does change correctly. The setting of miles or km does not change, nor does the zoom. 

[Netduma Admin]

Zoom makes sense, but miles/km is something that we should remember. We'll look into it, if not, we'll try and make this permanent in future versions. Thanks for letting us know!

[crunkjuice1]

Not knocking you one bit but to me it looks orange. This is my xr500 with the Xbox on standby. 

[FQs19]

So my brand new XR700, only two days old, just failed. 

At first my pc kept saying my internet cable wasn't connected, which it was. So I rebooted both my pc and XR700. That didn't help. I had to reset my windows 10 network from the settings page. That worked. So I figured my pc was the culprit. 

A couple hours later, my Nvidia shield said the ethernet cable wasn't connected. I thought how is it possible that two separate machines lost network connection in one day. 

I rebooted the Nvidia. Didn't help. So then I tried every lan port on the XR700 without rebooting it. No internet coming from any lan port, but all LED lights are showing traffic and internet. 

I then connected to my Macbook Pro to every lan and the wan port. Nothing. Nada. I couldn't even get the DumaOS dashboard to come up. 

I rebooted the XR700 finally and everything works again.

During all of this I noticed that there's an internal fan inside the XR700. I have never heard or seen it run since powering the XR700 on. 

I've factory reset the XR700 a couple times, so I don't believe it's a software issue. I'm guessing hardware issue. 

I'm also assuming that a chip inside the XR700 is fried which is causing all lan traffic to stop working. 

 

Joke's on me, I guess.  

I may contact Netgear, but more than likely it's just getting returned to Amazon.com. 

[FQs19]

My chrome browser isn't allowing me to contact Netgear Support. Why does Chrome insist on using a different form of Flash. So stupid.

I'm going to contact Netgear, using Microsoft Edge (ugh), and see what they say, but this is definitely getting returned tomorrow. 

[Guest Killhippie]

17 minutes ago, FQs19 said:

My chrome browser isn't allowing me to contact Netgear Support. Why does Chrome insist on using a different form of Flash. So stupid.

I'm going to contact Netgear, using Microsoft Edge (ugh), and see what they say, but this is definitely getting returned tomorrow. 

I recently beta tested a Netgear router with a 2.2Ghz quad  Core processor, that router which also had a fan, but in the time I tested it the fan didn’t come on or was so quite I never noticed, you have to really hammer it I think for it to come on. I think asking on the Netgear forum or asking on smallnetbuilder may help as basically your router is a R9000 with DumaOS so maybe ask other users how often the fan comes on, I think it doesn’t come on that frequently. I hope you get it sorted one way or another. 

[Netduma Fraser]

I would definitely contact their phone line for this as that certainly shouldn't be happening. When you do please provide your case ID and I'll escalate it as well

[FQs19]

48 minutes ago, Killhippie said:

I recently beta tested a Netgear router with a 2.2Ghz quad  Core processor, that router which also had a fan, but in the time I tested it the fan didn’t come on or was so quite I never noticed, you have to really hammer it I think for it to come on. I think asking on the Netgear forum or asking on smallnetbuilder may help as basically your router is a R9000 with DumaOS so maybe ask other users how often the fan comes on, I think it doesn’t come on that frequently. I hope you get it sorted one way or another. 

Thanks. I'll see what they say. I definitely can't leave my hand on top of the router. 

 

24 minutes ago, Netduma Fraser said:

I would definitely contact their phone line for this as that certainly shouldn't be happening. When you do please provide your case ID and I'll escalate it as well

Thanks Fraser.

[Guest Killhippie]

7 hours ago, FQs19 said:

Thanks. I'll see what they say. I definitely can't leave my hand on top of the router. 

 

Thanks Fraser.

That's very hot, I can understand your concern. Hope it gets fixed, and I would get Amazon to exchange or refund, wait a few weeks as there may be a faulty initial batch, but I would hope not and its just a bad luck one off. If its that hot I would not run it myself. Good luck.

[Guest Killhippie]

8 hours ago, crunkjuice1 said:

Not knocking you one bit but to me it looks orange. This is my xr500 with the Xbox on standby. 

Has that got the original plastic on it blocking the top air vents, or a trick of the light?

[Netduma Jack]

13 hours ago, crunkjuice1 said:

Not knocking you one bit but to me it looks orange. This is my xr500 with the Xbox on standby. 

I'm hopeful that the photo you shared just has weird lighting, but if that is indeed plastic covering your XR500 you need to remove that immediately. That's a great way to fry your router  

[twalls]

Supposedly, Amazon is delivering my XR700 today. I'll try to report back here if I notice it getting too hot, fans running, weird issues, etc. Nervous about the possibility of this being a bad first batch. I'm already looking at an XR500 that might be "defective."

[Netduma Fraser]

FQs, if you go to System Information what does the CPU graph show? Also have you contacted Netgear support and if so have you got the case ID?