Stuck at the initial set up, software updates loop, turns on and off continuously over an hour

We just received our first meta 3 quest for our son and our excitement died quickly as what we anticipated would be a quick simple set up turned into hours of troubleshooting with no success 

the headset and controllers work fine and no matter what we try, including rebooting routers, headset, power cycles, factory reset, it won’t get past the page where it keeps checking for the latest updates and software updates screen. We don’t even get to the pairing screen and yet unable to see the 5 digit code to pair the headset to the meta app.

can anyone help?