The point of the thread was not to review helplines, but now you mention it, I can't resist!...
Netgear's helpline were very helpful, very well organised and overall I'd say excellent apart from the one small (but crucial) point that they didn't know the VLANID had to be set to 101. This setting was not switched "on" by default on the D6400, and though there was an "Orange" (but no "EE") set of default settings built in, that didn't turn it on either - as it turned out there was no way the thing was going to work without that.
In contrast, my dealing with EE's helpline was the worst helpline experience I have been subjected to. I rang them a number of times over a two day period, altogether I must have been on the phone over three hours. Naturally I never had the pleasure of speaking to the same person twice. One operator refused to take the call any further when he discovered I had Netgear kit ("I don't know anything about that router"). The next two I explained the problem to put me on hold while they "investigated", but after being on hold for about 10 mins the call just cut out.
The next also put me on hold - after an even longer wait of muzak and random beeping noises the phone was then picked up by a different operator who didn't know anything about the problem or the first operator, insisting that he was the first person to deal with the call, despite the fact that the call must have been transferred to him from the woman who had put me on hold. Eventually I ended up speaking to a guy who sounded Irish. Although the accent made a welcome change, the volume of his call gradually reduced until it became so low I literally couldn't hear him - it sounded like he was standing across the room from his phone - and eventually I hung up in a rage and a cold sweat, this call alone having taken about an hour.
The final woman I spoke to tried to fix my problem by giving me the correct settings for an ADSL connection. When I protested that this was VDSL, she insisted that they were definitely supplying ADSL to me, and furthermore, that VDSL was not even available in my area. I looked down in despair at my Openreach VDSL modem and EE's own router, which I had been using successfully for over a year by this point, and started to sob.
They did discuss some of the settings during the above farce, but not the right one. In the end I picked up a reference to the VLANID somewhere on the internet (I can't even remember where - it was late and my head hurt from me banging it on my desk so much).
Hopefully the next EE customer who buys a Netgear D6400 will pick up one of the references to VLANID on the internet before they have the experience I did. I've also fed back the solution to Netgear - I hope they're well organised enough to have a way of making it available to their helpline. I'm not going to ring EE to tell them the answer - my nerves are not up to it...
Edited by deleted (Tue 26-May-15 11:50:37)
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