What's new

RT-AC86U weird issues

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

timofeid

New Around Here
Hello everyone,

Recently I've upgraded my trustworthy RT-N18U to RT-AC86U in order to achieve greater VPN speeds and 5 GHz. I've immediately flashed stable Merlin firmware 384.12, reset it to factory and configured the thing.
Wi-Fi is 2.4/5GHz SmartConnect (default settings), ISP is simple DHCP. No QoS, IPv6 etc.

Life was great… for a couple of weeks.

Today all of a sudden my wireless devices started to randomly lose Wi-Fi connection for long periods of time while the wired ones are working fine.

Router's web interface became extremely laggy, sometimes pages are simply stuck loading, Wi-Fi on the top icon is often half-green and a pop-up says 2.4 GHz is using channel 0. CPU load is below 5%, no overheating, RAM usage is about 50%, device itself is far from hot to touch.

After some googling I've tried 2.4/5 GHz SSID separation, N and legacy modes, 20 MHz bandwidth and manual control channels but to no avail, as well as factory reset — after quick initial setup is slows down to a crawl almost immediately.

How can I diagnose this issues? SSH access is working fine.

Thanks in advance.
 
Hello everyone,

Recently I've upgraded my trustworthy RT-N18U to RT-AC86U in order to achieve greater VPN speeds and 5 GHz. I've immediately flashed stable Merlin firmware 384.12, reset it to factory and configured the thing.
Wi-Fi is 2.4/5GHz SmartConnect (default settings), ISP is simple DHCP. No QoS, IPv6 etc.

Life was great… for a couple of weeks.

Today all of a sudden my wireless devices started to randomly lose Wi-Fi connection for long periods of time while the wired ones are working fine.

Router's web interface became extremely laggy, sometimes pages are simply stuck loading, Wi-Fi on the top icon is often half-green and a pop-up says 2.4 GHz is using channel 0. CPU load is below 5%, no overheating, RAM usage is about 50%, device itself is far from hot to touch.

After some googling I've tried 2.4/5 GHz SSID separation, N and legacy modes, 20 MHz bandwidth and manual control channels but to no avail, as well as factory reset — after quick initial setup is slows down to a crawl almost immediately.

How can I diagnose this issues? SSH access is working fine.

Thanks in advance.
Try testing with a tool like wifi analyser to see if you are using a channel that is getting interference
Also how are LAN clients fairing in preformace.
 
Users of the AC86U in South East Asia have posted a lot of complaints about 2.4GHz wireless failures on units bought from China. It could easily be a hardware fault. But one software thing you might want to try is turning off WPS in the advanced wireless settings.
 
Try testing with a tool like wifi analyser to see if you are using a channel that is getting interference
Also how are LAN clients fairing in preformace.
Thanks, I've checked it — no more than 3 networks per channel and there are always a couple or more of "free" channels available with weak <-80 dBms networks.
 
Users of the AC86U in South East Asia have posted a lot of complaints about 2.4GHz wireless failures on units bought from China. It could easily be a hardware fault. But one software thing you might want to try is turning off WPS in the advanced wireless settings.
Thanks, I always keep WPS off.
I'm not in South East Asia region but the label says H/W Rev. 1.5, Made in China, 2018.
 
Similar issue here. Upgraded from 87U to 86U a few weeks ago, and the fun started... I experience WiFi disconnections for short periods of 10-60 seconds once or twice a day. When it happens, all clients show they are connected to WiFi, but I can't even ping router. Minute later, everything starts working again. Router has a sticker that says it was manufactured on 2019 in China, so I guess it should have all the hardware bugs (if any) resolved.

In my situation, the issue is not related to crowded channels because I only have one neighbor, so there's no interference. And this issue randomly happens not depending on number of connected clients (very often my PC is the only connected client).

P.S> As per suggestion at https://www.snbforums.com/threads/major-issues-w-rt-ac86u.56342/page-5#post-504892 I just disabled airtime fairness to see if that helps.
 
Last edited:

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top