Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Wanted an AC router, did lots of research including DLink, Netgear Nighthawk, and Asus high end routers. Liked the concept of this router's SmartLink interface. There were lots of bad reviews but also some good ones too and figured I'd try it out, worst case I could return it. Bought in June 2014. Day 1, setup was easy, range was great. 3 hours later while streaming the signal was gone. For 2 days this occurred anywhere from 3 -7 times per day. Pulling the power seemed to fix it but a $180 router shouldn't need to be rebooted (ever in my opinion) much less 3x-7x per day. Call 1: So I call Linksys/Belkin (well armed with how the experience might go after reading the reviews) to resolve the issue. I go through the motions of getting my contact info, explaining the problem and responding to their question path they read directly off a procedure list in front of them. Fine, maybe it will help. Verified that all the latest settings were enabled and that my router was properly configured, but they wanted me to re-clone the MAC address from a hard wire connection. Reboot and im back on my way after an entire hour on the phone. Call 2: Day 2, called again b/c of same issue, go through all of the same BS before despite having a case ID. I get a Sr. Technician finally who wanted to reset the router to factory and then re-establish settings. So night 2 after 1.5 hours of the same playbook of questions, the router is rebooted and works, for an hour before dropping both 2.4 and 5 GHz networks. Went to bed and decided to deal with the one last time the next evening. Call 3: Tried to reboot router first, that wouldn't work - no wireless internet could be achieved whatsoever despite it broadcasting the network name/signal. I was nice to the person who answered and said I know the router not working wasn't their fault but was out of patience, I want a Sr. Tech NOW. This person tries to run me through the same lineup of questions, I stop them in their tracks to state that my Sr. Tech last night said if I had issue again to ask for a Sr. Tech out of the gate. After 3 min of arguing I got a Sr Tech, explained the situation. He tried some settings an to no avail wireless internet could not be achieved. He sent me to customer service for a replacement. This all took about 25 minutes, best deal so far. Customer service gives me the option to ship back the defective item AT MY COST prior to the sending a new one or they would send a new one with a hold on my credit card until I returned the THREE DAY OLD defective unit back AT MY COST. I told the customer rep this policy of me paying to replace a new item was unacceptable and that I wanted a manager. Got a manager pretty quickly, expressed my issues and they finally agreed to pay the return shipping cost after 10 minutes of deliberation, and I was told that they could only do that once. (so, should I expect your replacement to be garbage too and have to pay my own way for sending that one back?!?). I also confronted the manager and last Sr. Tech to see if they were aware of the R6900 reviews out there and they said yes, but couldn't answer me what they were doing to fix it besides getting bad product returned to "investigate". At this point I had no plan to move forward since I could return it to Amazon and get my money back and buy another product that didn't have awful reviews. BOTTOM LINE - THIS THING WONT WORK RELIABLY, Linksys--> Belkin (no more good quality Cisco) customer service and policies are terrible and even if I got a working R6900 I would refuse to own a product from such a terribly run company. I can't say that DLINK or NetGear is better but at least their reviews are much better and it's worth a shot that their product will actually work. Don't order this part thinking you'll be a good statistic and it'll work for you. It probably wont and you too will invest 4+ annoying hours on the phone listening to scripted problem solving skills just to figure out it won't work. I have plenty of PC experience and dealing with networks and had two techs confirm I setup the router properly. To those at Linksys/Belkin: It's 2014, routers should work out of the box with minimal setup config and be reliable, at least for 1 month without requiring a reboot for a near $200 product. Please invest in some more engineers who know what they are doing and beef up your end of line testing for each unit. Unacceptable product.