Second new AC87 today, second dead 5Ghz radio

[Turbo Brian]

First AC87 had a non-functional 5Ghz radio. it never came on, even at first boot. the light never lit and no amount of updates and resets brought it to life. returned it and the second one did come on at first boot. did a firmware update, configured it, still working. my devices had "fast" connection speeds but speed tests were all stuck at 6Mbit regardless of actual connection listed. decided to reboot and since then, the 5Ghz radio has been completely dead. ive rebooted (soft reboot), ive used the power button, ive removed power completely. ive used the professional tab to turn off the radios and turn them back "on". nothing works. looks like complete hardware failure. two devices in a row. unless someone has any ideas, this thing is going back yet again but im getting a refund instead.

and before anyone says new routers have bugs, yes, i expect that but i also expect the most basic of functionality, like wireless, in a wireless router to work out of the box.

 

[theveterans]

Maybe you have some kind of power surge issue where the 5 GHz radio just fries.

 

[Turbo Brian]

its plugged into a UPS where my previous N66 was plugged in at. nothing else on the UPS is fried. none of my UPS's have beeped at me or otherwise kicked over to batteries due to power issues.

 

[Turbo Brian]

well, i did a factory reset and that seems to magically make the 5Ghz radio work... until you reboot it then you are SOL. Basically, the only way to have a working 5Ghz radio is to reset to factory defaults and never reboot the router, ever. another problem is, the router doesnt seem to work any faster than 6mbit on the 5Ghz radio. (thats why i wanted to try a reboot). going back in the box tomorrow. il l hang on to it until my return period is up then if there is no software fix, its going back to the store.

i do find it odd that im the only one having either of these problems. ive seen others with internet stopping working, some Macbook pro issues, other unrelated UI bugs, etc but ive not seen anyone that has 5Ghz radio that will stop working after a reboot or connection speeds limited to 6mbit regardless of actual "connection speed" and range.

 

[madhatter01]

well, i did a factory reset and that seems to magically make the 5Ghz radio work... until you reboot it then you are SOL. Basically, the only way to have a working 5Ghz radio is to reset to factory defaults and never reboot the router, ever. another problem is, the router doesnt seem to work any faster than 6mbit on the 5Ghz radio. (thats why i wanted to try a reboot). going back in the box tomorrow. il l hang on to it until my return period is up then if there is no software fix, its going back to the store.

i do find it odd that im the only one having either of these problems. ive seen others with internet stopping working, some Macbook pro issues, other unrelated UI bugs, etc but ive not seen anyone that has 5Ghz radio that will stop working after a reboot or connection speeds limited to 6mbit regardless of actual "connection speed" and range.

Well I know what is going on. Its a issues they are working on. Just power off via the power button and turn it back on. It will work perfect. If you reboot using the reboot in the gui it does not shut down all the way and gets stuck after turning off 5ghz.

 

[Turbo Brian]

Well I know what is going on. Its a issues they are working on. Just power off via the power button and turn it back on. It will work perfect. If you reboot using the reboot in the gui it does not shut down all the way and gets stuck after turning off 5ghz.

as i said in my original post, ive tried powering off with the button and pulling the power cord. neither will get the 5ghz radio to come back on.

 

[mistame]

well, i did a factory reset and that seems to magically make the 5Ghz radio work... until you reboot it then you are SOL. Basically, the only way to have a working 5Ghz radio is to reset to factory defaults and never reboot the router, ever. another problem is, the router doesnt seem to work any faster than 6mbit on the 5Ghz radio. (thats why i wanted to try a reboot). going back in the box tomorrow. il l hang on to it until my return period is up then if there is no software fix, its going back to the store.

i do find it odd that im the only one having either of these problems. ive seen others with internet stopping working, some Macbook pro issues, other unrelated UI bugs, etc but ive not seen anyone that has 5Ghz radio that will stop working after a reboot or connection speeds limited to 6mbit regardless of actual "connection speed" and range.

I'm having the same issue as well, except my speed isn't limited to 6mbit. The 5ghz radio worked out of the box, but any reboots (with or without the power button), including after firmware updates kill the radio. A factory reset is the only thing that will bring it back. Pretty annoying

 

[Turbo Brian]

to update, the 6mbit issue appears to have been a speedtest.net related problem and a poorly timed one at that. i changed the automatic server detection to one hosted by my ISP and i get similar to wirespeed results. my bad on that. the radio issue however, still a problem. i did load merlins firmware he posted the other day specifically for the AC87. i got it configured all over again last night before bed but have not rebooted it yet. working from home and didnt want to jack around with it but i will try a reboot after work today and see if i experience the same dead radio after reboot.

 

[DaveMishSr]

First AC87 had a non-functional 5Ghz radio. it never came on, even at first boot. the light never lit and no amount of updates and resets brought it to life. returned it and the second one did come on at first boot. did a firmware update, configured it, still working. my devices had "fast" connection speeds but speed tests were all stuck at 6Mbit regardless of actual connection listed. decided to reboot and since then, the 5Ghz radio has been completely dead. ive rebooted (soft reboot), ive used the power button, ive removed power completely. ive used the professional tab to turn off the radios and turn them back "on". nothing works. looks like complete hardware failure. two devices in a row. unless someone has any ideas, this thing is going back yet again but im getting a refund instead.

and before anyone says new routers have bugs, yes, i expect that but i also expect the most basic of functionality, like wireless, in a wireless router to work out of the box.

Did you try a factory reset? If not try powering down the router and leave it off for a few minutes. Then, press and hold the WPS button for at least 10 seconds when you press the power button to boot up the router. Then manually reconfigure your settings taking care NOT to use a cfg file to restore your settings. Hope this helps.

 

[DaveMishSr]

I've also just remembered a trick I use once in a while that sometimes seems to help "reset" the internet connection when having issues. When you load the router's web-based GUI, click on the WAN icon under Internet Status. When you do so the Internet Status dialog box opens up on the right hand side. At the top of that box is the Internet Connection "switch". Clicking on it will turn it off. Wait a few seconds (doesn't have to be an overly long pause) and then click it again to turn the Internet connection back on. Perhaps this will help someone else if it is useless for your issue. Good luck.

 

[Turbo Brian]

DaveMishSr: read my posts. reset's been done. thats the only thing that makes the radio work. any reboot or power cycle after that it never comes back up.

mistame: glad im not the only one with this issue.

running the merlin firmware has made no difference. rebooted and also powered on/off with the button and same results. the 5ghz radio never comes back. i guess its time to reset for the 5th or 6th time and then not touch it and hope i dont need to reboot ever again. and no, im not using a config to import settings. im doing it from scratch by hand each and every time, as annoying and time consuming as it is.

 

[RMerlin]

I never had to reset mine despite running a lot of beta builds. Please post your 5Ghz settings including SSID. Also report whether you are using any special characters in the WPA key.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

 

[benposton]

I also saw this issue today, after I picked up the 87U this morning at Frys.

I was running along pretty smoothly most of the day turning on various features. The very last thing I did was adjust the "Highest-High-Medium, etc" designations for the devices on the Adaptive QOS Bandwidth Monitor tab. When I hit apply, it never came back fully. The 5GHz light never came back on, but I also couldn't get to the device page no matter how many times I pulled the plug.

Did a factory reset and applied a saved configuration from a few hours previous and it worked fine.

Just before, I plugged in and configured USB but it seemed to be working OK, even after reboots. But for now, I'm leaving that unplugged probably until the next firmware update.

FYI, my 5GHz WPA2 password is all text (upper and lower case) and no spaces.

 

[mistame]

I never had to reset mine despite running a lot of beta builds. Please post your 5Ghz settings including SSID. Also report whether you are using any special characters in the WPA key.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

SSID: ASeriesOfTubes5G
Hide SSD: No
Channel Bandwidth: 80MHz
Control Panel: Auto
Extension Channel: Auto
Authentication Method: WPA2-Personal
WPA Encryption: AES
Network Key Rotation Interval: 3600

WPA2-Personal AES key contains letters, numbers and one apostrophe. All settings used have been "out of the box" on both merlin and official firmware (I am currently on 376.46 Merlin). Let me know what other info I can provide.

 

[Richard1864]

SSID: ASeriesOfTubes5G
Hide SSD: No
Channel Bandwidth: 80MHz
Control Panel: Auto
Extension Channel: Auto
Authentication Method: WPA2-Personal
WPA Encryption: AES
Network Key Rotation Interval: 3600

WPA2-Personal AES key contains letters, numbers and one apostrophe. All settings used have been "out of the box" on both merlin and official firmware (I am currently on 376.46 Merlin). Let me know what other info I can provide.

Take out the apostrophe in the WPA2 Passkey. That actually could be the problem, as it is considered a special character which can screw things up in both SSID and Passkeys. Take it out, and the reboot the router using the power button. Let us know what happens please?

 

[Turbo Brian]

I never had to reset mine despite running a lot of beta builds. Please post your 5Ghz settings including SSID. Also report whether you are using any special characters in the WPA key.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

ssid: skynet5
hide: yes (ive tried no and it didnt matter)
Wireless mode: Auto
Channel bandwidth: 80
Control channel: Auto (have tried specifying too)
Extention cahnnel: auto
Auth: WPA2 Personal
Encryption AES
Key: upper, lower, number, spaces, comma, apostrophe
Interval: 3600

for reference, ive used the key on my N66 and other brand routers before without issue. but i DID try other stuff here including no spaces and nothing but lower case letters. ssid has never had spaces or special chars. in fact, when i was messing with it on day 1, i left the default ssids and just used a lower case key and didnt touch a single other wireless setting and it still would not come back after a reboot. i can try messing with it some more after work today tho im not sure i have much left to try...

 

[Turbo Brian]

oh and since only the 5ghz radio has the issue (2.4 works fine after reboots) should i also remove spaces and special characters from the 2.4ghz key? im not sure if i tried that as well. ive just been messing with the 5ghz side.

 

[RMerlin]

The 5 GHz radio is handled very differently from past models, since it's a separate CPU + OS running on the router, and parameters are passed between the Broadcom CPU and the QTN CPU through special function calls. That could explain why some oddities could occur with SSIDs or WPA keys that contain special characters. I would try going with a pure alphanumerical key for tests.

Just the 5 GHz one should be enough, but it can't hurt to also do the same with the 2.4 GHz. Asuswrt in general is very fragile when it comes to anything that contains special characters such as '<>.

 

[Gary Key]

ssid: skynet5
hide: yes (ive tried no and it didnt matter)
Wireless mode: Auto
Channel bandwidth: 80
Control channel: Auto (have tried specifying too)
Extention cahnnel: auto
Auth: WPA2 Personal
Encryption AES
Key: upper, lower, number, spaces, comma, apostrophe
Interval: 3600

for reference, ive used the key on my N66 and other brand routers before without issue. but i DID try other stuff here including no spaces and nothing but lower case letters. ssid has never had spaces or special chars. in fact, when i was messing with it on day 1, i left the default ssids and just used a lower case key and didnt touch a single other wireless setting and it still would not come back after a reboot. i can try messing with it some more after work today tho im not sure i have much left to try...

Please remove any special characters from the SSID and WPA info, update to 2678 and then PM your serial number and contact info to me. We have not seen this problem reported in the service center yet and I cannot replicate it here. We will have a customer care specialist contact you directly.

 

[Gary Key]

I also saw this issue today, after I picked up the 87U this morning at Frys.

I was running along pretty smoothly most of the day turning on various features. The very last thing I did was adjust the "Highest-High-Medium, etc" designations for the devices on the Adaptive QOS Bandwidth Monitor tab. When I hit apply, it never came back fully. The 5GHz light never came back on, but I also couldn't get to the device page no matter how many times I pulled the plug.

Did a factory reset and applied a saved configuration from a few hours previous and it worked fine.

Just before, I plugged in and configured USB but it seemed to be working OK, even after reboots. But for now, I'm leaving that unplugged probably until the next firmware update.

FYI, my 5GHz WPA2 password is all text (upper and lower case) and no spaces.

Please PM your serial number and contact info to me. We have not seen this problem reported in the service center yet and I cannot replicate it here based on your listed steps. We will have a customer care specialist contact you directly.