Is my AC-3100 defective?

[MordredKLB]

I've got a 2800sf 2-story house with my entry point setup (100Mbit cable) on the 2nd floor close to a corner of the house. On Tuesday after reading reviews and this forum I bought an AC-3100. Set it up, updated the stock firmware, and was absolutely blown away. I ran all over the house with my laptop running fast.com tests and getting 120Mbps in literally every spot I tried connecting to the 5GHz band (I basically didn't even test the 2.4 band). I went out the front of the house, stood in the street and was reading 120 as well which wasn't too surprising as it's about 40 feet straight show with just one exterior wall. I went out the back of the house by the pool and saw my speeds drop to about 40Mbps. That was a good 70 feet distance with 3 walls in direct line in between (although the routers room is open to downstairs great room it just can't see it directly from it's placement). I couldn't have been happier, even though I was having some issues with port forwarding working. Figured I'd get that settled the next night.

I wake up Wednesday morning and the router is essentially dead. I could get it to boot to recovery, but was unable to get it to reflash any of the firmware I tried. I took it back to Best Buy and swapped it for a new one and set it up Thursday. It was running the very first version of the stock firmware. I updated it to the latest Netgear, and then this time I installed AsusMerlin. Port forwarding worked instantly with no issues. Fast.com speeds seemed fine, but I decided to run some iperf tests to really see how fast the 5G really was.

With my laptop literally 1 feet away and running 8 threads, iperf was showing 900Mbps. Literally 12 feet away with direct LOS, iperf read 600Mbps which seemed like a pretty surprising drop off.
Down the stairs another 20 feet away, iperf is now at 200.
In the master bedroom which is closer to the router, but direct line goes through a ceiling and two walls iperf shows 78Mbps with no thread doing better than 12.

Fast.com in the bedroom is all over the place showing 120Mbps sometimes and down to 10-15 other times. At times I can get my speeds to go from 20 to 120 just by moving the laptop 2 feet in one direction or the other.

I took the laptop in the backyard and get no signal unless I press it up against the glass door. A far cry from the 40Mbps I was getting 10 feet further away.
In the front of the house where I showed 120 on the first router, I got 1.3.
This morning I noticed my phone kept losing connecting from the breakfast nook downstairs.

I didn't have the first router long enough to really know how stable those speeds I was seeing were, but I did probably run 40 fast.com/speedtest.net tests off it in the farthest corner of every room and never showed anything under 110. That has not been my experience at all with the replacement router.

There don't appear to be any other wireless routers on the same channels I'm using, so I can't think of anything else that would be effecting the range.

Should I take this router back and try a 3rd time or do I need to look into a different solution for my home wifi?

 

[MordredKLB]

Think I posted this in the wrong forum. I am running the latest official Merlin though so if there's settings I should try, I'm down.

 

[ColinTaylor]

I suggest that you go back to exactly the same setup as you had before (e.g. reload stock firmware). If it then works as well as it did initially then you'll know it's not a hardware issue.

 

[MordredKLB]

I suggest that you go back to exactly the same setup as you had before (e.g. reload stock firmware). If it then works as well as it did initially then you'll know it's not a hardware issue.

I'd hate to lose the AsusMerlin stuff, but I might do that. Just in case you missed it, these were two different routers. One that appeared to be working better than I could have expected for all of 4 hours, and a second one that seems to be having range issues.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Just in case you missed it, these were two different routers.

Yes, they were both the same make and model though? There are so many variables involved when going from one firmware version to another, particularly stock to 3rd party, it's quicker to initially eliminate any hardware issue by baselining the software/firmware.

 

[MordredKLB]

Yes, they were both the same make and model though? There are so many variables involved when going from one firmware version to another, particularly stock to 3rd party, it's quicker to initially eliminate any hardware issue by baselining the software/firmware.

Fair point. I'll try that first. Assuming the speeds don't increase, do you have any thoughts?

I should also mention that the only changes I made to settings in the firmware was enabling ping, ssh, and MU-MIMO. Is it worth disabling MU-MIMO and seeing if anything changes?

 

[ColinTaylor]

Fair point. I'll try that first. Assuming the speeds don't increase, do you have any thoughts?

Not really. Identical hardware and software should provide identical results.

Is it worth disabling MU-MIMO and seeing if anything changes?

Definitely worth trying:

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/r...65-is-now-available.37295/page-32#post-315960

Also make sure you turn off Airtime Fairness and MU-MIMO, as these are known to be unreliable.

Oh, and by the way, I'm assuming that after you loaded Merlin's firmware you did a factory default reset and manual setup?

 

[john9527]

And you didn't say, but make sure you are testing with the router in the same location, and with the same antenna orientation. Even small changes in either of these can make a significant difference.

 

[MordredKLB]

Things I tried this afternoon:

I disabled Airtime Fairness and MU-MIMO and neither made a difference.
I angled two of the antennas slightly towards the first floor, didn't make a difference.
I restored the official ASUS firmware and did a default reset. No change.

Oh, and by the way, I'm assuming that after you loaded Merlin's firmware you did a factory default reset and manual setup?

I did not because I never made any changes to the original firmware (and Merlin said it wasn't required). I literally unboxed, updated to the latest ASUS, and then updated to Merlin in the first 15 minutes or so. It never even had a WAN connection before I put Merlin on it.

And you didn't say, but make sure you are testing with the router in the same location, and with the same antenna orientation. Even small changes in either of these can make a significant difference.

I was.

I decided there was probably something wrong with the router and went and got another one to compare. Interestingly, I noticed that the first router and the 3rd router both had HW rev A5 on the box. The 2nd router was picked up at a different store and was HW rev A2.

I installed AC3100 #3 in the exact same spots #1 and #2 were and things definitely seem improved, although not drastically. My MacBook's RSSI readings are about 4dB higher than they were on #2. I get some signal in front of the house, and a decent amount in the backyard. 5G speeds do seem to drop pretty rapidly with distance, but I guess that's to be expected. I'll keep testing and hopefully I can just be done messing with all of this soon.

 

[ColinTaylor]

It's also worth trying different 5GHz channels. As well as having (slightly) different levels of penetration, different groups of channels have different power levels.

 

[Gregory Phillips]

I would perform a Wi-Fi survey to see what other networks are present and their channels. I always have to manually adjust my channel settings to get in between the neighbors for the best signal and channel quality.

 

[MordredKLB]

Only one other AC channel the router can see (on band 40). I'm on 149 and having no issues with interference as far as I can tell. I tried a few others on router #2 and didn't see any obvious improvement. Router #3 definitely is doing better. I think it's not as good as thought #1 was doing, but I also didn't have it active long enough to know if it was really as good as I thought it was.

I may reposition this router a little bit just to see if that helps things, but there's not a lot of better places to put it unfortunately. Still overall I'm pretty happy with the purchase.