Netgear Orbi Tri-Band Wi-Fi 6 Mesh System (Open Box)

When I see a bad review on Amazon, sometimes I think to myself "that's probably a user error, they are not doing something right". There are a lot of bad reviews about the quality control on these refurbished units. At first I was skeptical, but now I am convinced. I wish I never bought this device. For some background: I was hacking around on the internet way back in the 90s. I am not an IT guy by trade, but I'm fairly tech-savvy. I've had every hardware set up imaginable over the years so you can say I have a little experience. First of all, the Orbi set up process is not great at all. It's actually terrible. The unit shipped with firmware that was TWO WHOLE versions out of date. You would think if they refurbished the unit, they would toss on an updated firmware. Nah. So you're setting this new wifi up, and you need to update the firmware, but you need internet in order to get the firmware update. The Orbi interface would not complete the firmware update on its own. I had to find the firmware on their site, download it to my computer and send it to the device. Ok, I can deal with that. Secondly, the Orbi web interface is terrrrrible. I guess I'm a little spoiled with Google/Nest Wifi. The interface looks like it was very sloppily built and had all sorts of odd errors and glitches. Then on top of it, it's slow as molasses. Made for a very frustrating time trying to click around through the settings. The app wasn't much better, and you can't do everything through the app. Some things (like disabling 5ghz) you can ONLY do through the web interface. One more thing. You may buy this device thinking that it will allow you to disable the 5ghz channel. While they do have checkboxes for disabling 5ghz, if you use a wifi analyzer, you will see those channels are still being broadcasted. Maybe that's the way all of these work, I'm not sure, but that is not what I expected. If I uncheck the checkbox for 5ghz, it should actually stop broadcasting in 5ghz. Otherwise why even have the setting? Lastly, and this is the big one, this is why you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT BUY THIS. After getting everything set up finally, after literally hours of messing around with this thing, the connections were dropping like crazy. It would be up for 3 minutes, down for 3 minutes, up for–you get it. I finally went to bed last night because I felt like I was going crazy. Woke up this morning with a fresh brain and discovered the issue. Want to know what it was? If you so much as even BREATHE on the power cable connecting into the back of the unit, it shorts out the device and flickers the power on and off very quickly. There is so much slop/play where the power cord connects that I really wonder if that was even the correct cable for the device. How in the world was this unit refurbished and that issue is not caught? Utterly frustrated by how much time was wasted on this. Less than 24 hours after receiving it, I am returning it. DO NOT BUY.