NETGEAR Wireless Mesh Access Point

I really, really want to give the WAC564 and WAC540 I bought as a set high marks. In general they work very well and I love them. However, setting them up in mesh mode (which is a primary selling point) requires that you use the Insight app on a phone or the Insight website (not the device web management.) In a recent improvement, access to the Insight website is now provided for a year for free, but after that requires a subscription. Managing devices from a phone can be convenient at times, but often is far more painful given the limited touch interface of most phones.Setup should be, and was advertised to be simple. In my case it was anything but, and required phone support. I will say that their Tier 1 level support was excellent. Setting them up successfully eventually required factory resetting both devices and starting from scratch configuring them. That was frustrating and time consuming, but support was helpful in trying other solutions first, and the factory resets did return the devices to a functional state.One of the advertised features is using dedicated frequency spectrum for the backhaul between devices. I was unable to get this configuration to enable in the app and opened a support case, again Tier 1 support was great, but escalated to Tier 2 which quickly escalated to Tier 3 where an engineering case was opened. And here things have gotten more frustrating. Tier 3 support I can only guess gets graded on how quickly they close the case. Early interactions had Tier 3 support pinging me repeatedly if I didn't respond quickly even though they would disappear for days to research issues. When engineering claimed to have a fix, I was pressed to close the case even though the fix had not yet been deployed to my devices. Eventually, discovering that it was only in the IOS app that supposedly had the issue, and finding out that the Insight web site was now "free" for a year for new devices (it wasn't when the support case was opened) I updated the configuration from the web site, to find out the configuration now reported success in all devices, but spectrum was still not being dedicated to the backhaul even after rebooting the APs and clients. So the feature still isn't working. But now Tier 3 support is again pressuring me to close this case and open another one for this "separate" issue of the feature I reported as not working still not working.In short, the devices seem overall to be really nice. Netgear basic tier one support is helpful and effective if you have issues. But my experience with tier 3 support has been so unsatisfying that I have to deduct a lot of stars overall and particularly from tech support.