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AC66U + Clear spot -- need advice

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SkyPing

New Around Here
Hi everyone!

I've been using my Clear Spot for the past few months as our main Internet gateway. It has been working fine supporting a couple PCs, tablets, phones, and Apple TV (kinda). Unfortunately, it doesn't handle hi-speed intranet traffic very well (e.g. streaming videos from iTunes on PC to Apple TV). No surprise there, it wasn't designed for that usage.

So, to help distribute load better, I decided to try using the AC66U for wireless LAN service and the Clear Spot only for WAN service, via direct USB connection. This mostly works. The intranet traffic is great (streaming between devices works w/o interruption), but some Internet traffic is having issues, with some sites failing to load, weird latency issues in WoW, my wife's SSL VPN failing to connect.

Specifically, when I try to access speedtest.net, both IE and Chrome will stall. Turning on Developer mode in Chrome, I can see that the base HTML loads, along with all the resources, except one: http://c.speedtest.net/css/reset.css

This seemed extremely odd to me. I cleared caches and tried again. Nope. No go. If I let Chrome sit long enough (4-7 minutes), it will time out and render the page. And the speed tests will work.

Trying to load that resource directly, in IE and Chrome, will also timeout. However, in Safari, it just loads. And using wget also works just fine.

I disabled NAT on the AC66, as double-NAT can cause problems. No change in behavior.

Last thing I've tried is putting the AC66 in AP mode, but in that mode, it doesn't appear to be forwarding traffic to the Clear Spot via USB: I can connect to wireless, but DHCP fails.

So, I'm at my wits end, here. The odd behavior with *some* resources failing to load under certain circumstances is just mind-boggling (bad router! bad!). And failing to forward traffic to the WAN circuit, under AP mode, well, um, that's what AP mode is supposed to do, right?

It looks like my best option is to attempt wireless bridging. I'm afraid that will also fail, miserably. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers!
--sky
 
I managed to get Media Bridge working between the AC66 and the Clear Spot, via 2.5GHz. It is a bit sensitive to distance, unfortunately, dropping the connection when it's just a little over 10 feet away.

It seems like the hardware has great potential, if only the software was up to snuff.
 

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