Anyone had their Netgear N900 (WNDR-4500) Fail ?

[TechLarry]

Mine has in a rather spectacular fashion...

After a few years of using a WNDR-3700, probably the best router I've ever owned, I decided to upgrade to their high-end (and expensive) WNDR-4500. Why not

It worked fine for a few months, but last week it went crazy. It started dropping the internet connection, and I only had "windows" of connectivity that lasted 5-10 seconds. The rest of the time the packet loss was in the 70% - 100% range.

A picture speaks louder than words. Here's a PingPlotter (what a great tool) that shows it pretty clearly:

Anyone had failures in their N900's like this?

My move to Netgear was after DLink totally hosed over all it's customers with their (once great) Ubicom based routers and killed them with bad firmware (my DGL-4500 is still dead). I was hesitent, but the WNDR-3700 turned out to be a real winner.

But, here we go again dammit

My biggest fear was ever having to deal with Netgear support which, in my experience from the past, is truly horrific.