What's new

The joys of back to school and Apple products

  • 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!

Ronv42

Senior Member
Summer was great in my household, all my wireless devices were getting along just fine with my AC87R and Merlin's great firmware till start of school and now 3 apple devices are pushed upon my household all having to work so my kids can get their education. Now I have to deal with a MacBook and two tablets that all seem to want to have the Wi-Fi all to themselves.

It first started when connected via 5 GHz which has been all over these forms but never bugged me. But for some reason these devices only connect within very close proximity to the router. So I tried the normal trick, turn off beamforming, nope doesn't help and now the roku's upstairs won't stream properly so beamforming goes back on. So I decide to put them on 2.4 and now we have the coverage and the connections. But when they are connected many of my older 2.4 GHz devices become flakey and WiFi calling does not work properly on the cell phones. I only use 20 MHz in 2.4 band for N connections so I am not turning of N so that is out.

So my only solution was to break out my old N16 router, and set it up as a access point and carve out a channel and SSID only for the Apple devices and disabled N support so we are back to basic G. Now the world is in harmony again. I sure hope the other kids homes have patience to work though this issues. I could just image what they may be going though.
 
I've never had this issue on wifi and i think you may need QoS instead. I have multiple wifi clients which use more resource than what you have. I have a few clients doing multiple things at the same time such as gaming, streaming and web browsing all at the same time on each laptop. It was also a mixed environment with some on AC and some on wireless N.

I think the AC87U has quite a lot of issues still. I use the AC68U and AC3200 with a very fast wired router.
 
very odd. what do you mean by "all to themselves"? Do you mean other devices get a signal but not much bandwidth? Or do they seem to interfere signalwise?

EDIT: same experience as @System Error Message . And also on 68U. Wonder if its a 87U/R issue. Sure do see lots of complaints on those.
 
My post was meant to be anecdotal and general in nature to show how complex any minor change to a networking environment can cascade into kayos. I have been using the AC87R since ASUS brought it to market. Never really had any issues with the router/clients other that the first version of firmware was very unstable. I have been working with networking for over 25 years, have over 45 locations where I support public access points using versions of Tomato firmware that I customized from ToastMan's and Vicktek's builds.

I appreciate the comments, as I stated I isolated the Apple "guests" to their own private frequency on a dedicated AP, which is still connect to my AC87R as a wired Ethernet connection. Gave them the lowest protocol they all the support. Harmony is insured. At the end of the school year the N16 will go back into storage waiting to serve up these Apple invaders when they return.
 
I've had issues getting apple devices to work with my AC68U before but thats because they had trouble doing WPA2 with AES but even when using wifi with mixed encryption allowed it didnt have issues either.

Instead of giving them the crowded 2.4Ghz you can use something like the AC3200 which has 2 5Ghz radios where you can give one for apple devices. Ive had many changes to my wifi usage and surroundings and it didnt even affect my wifi performance.

The AC87U is still having issues despite updated firmwares. For example
The limited 350Mb/s software NAT speed despite overclocking
The longer time wifi clients take to associate with it despite better clocks
Crashing and high temperature
bad PSUs
 
My post was meant to be anecdotal and general in nature to show how complex any minor change to a networking environment can cascade into kayos.
You're right on. I had one of myfoscams kill my network all because of an antenna that was internally cracked. major disruption and a very difficult problem to find. little things make big problems.
 

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

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