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[AC86U] Help with ideal setup and/or steps to diagnose and rectify faults

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Vilbs

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Hi there - brief background. 3 story big house, fairly thick walls. About 6 wifi networks visible from neighbours. 4g Huawei modem top floor (for best reception). Hard wired to router in middle of 2nd floor (for best broadcast range). Fairly thick walls.

Until a couple of days ago the router had been RT-N66U. The range had been ok - just about doing the whole house on 2mhz but I had 5mhz turned off as it just didn't seem to be useable (no range and kept flipping in and out). However as the router was fairly old and a lack of decent control over prioritisation of traffic I decided to upgrade to AC86U.

Currently I am using it out of the box with default settings, except for having turned on QOS and prioritising VOIP then streaming then browsing but things aren't great. Web browser intermittently slows to unusable - the 5mhz flicks in and out even if I am fairly close to router. I then decided to turn off QOS but things are still the same. Reading these forums there are lots of suggestions of turning off smart connect, turning off beam forming etc; but I don't want to randomly change a lot of options - I would like to try and be a bit more scientific about it.

Can anyone recommend a useful sequence of tasks to try to sort things out? I don't want to get the router working nicely - but never being quite sure what actually sorted it and having the rest of the routers life with possibly disabled functionality that I could have had enabled. Similarly is there a way to get reports on things like pageloads or more importantly page timeouts to then objectively compare changes made? Hope that all makes sense!

Many thanks in advance.
 
Hi there - brief background. 3 story big house, fairly thick walls. About 6 wifi networks visible from neighbours. 4g Huawei modem top floor (for best reception). Hard wired to router in middle of 2nd floor (for best broadcast range). Fairly thick walls.

Until a couple of days ago the router had been RT-N66U. The range had been ok - just about doing the whole house on 2mhz but I had 5mhz turned off as it just didn't seem to be useable (no range and kept flipping in and out). However as the router was fairly old and a lack of decent control over prioritisation of traffic I decided to upgrade to AC86U.

Currently I am using it out of the box with default settings, except for having turned on QOS and prioritising VOIP then streaming then browsing but things aren't great. Web browser intermittently slows to unusable - the 5mhz flicks in and out even if I am fairly close to router. I then decided to turn off QOS but things are still the same. Reading these forums there are lots of suggestions of turning off smart connect, turning off beam forming etc; but I don't want to randomly change a lot of options - I would like to try and be a bit more scientific about it.

Can anyone recommend a useful sequence of tasks to try to sort things out? I don't want to get the router working nicely - but never being quite sure what actually sorted it and having the rest of the routers life with possibly disabled functionality that I could have had enabled. Similarly is there a way to get reports on things like pageloads or more importantly page timeouts to then objectively compare changes made? Hope that all makes sense!

Many thanks in advance.

I would consider my install notes for setting up your 86U (ignore the AiMesh/node bits for now)... respect the details until you know better. Keep it simple until you've had time to observe your equipment working as it should. (To install 86U firmware 45717, you will have to download it and do so manually.)

Once you have a clean install, you can proceed to assess performance. First, wire a PC to the 86U and perform speedtest.net or similar to determine WAN speed capacity for a point of reference. Your Internet source may be causing some/most of your issues. What ISP speeds are you expecting?

Although the router has many settings, a basic working setup does not require changing many of them, so once you have achieved this, you will be able to consider external factors without thinking something is not set properly in the router. IF the router is still a performance factor after a basic install, then it might be a hardware or firmware defect, not a setting issue.

OE
 
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I would consider my install notes for setting up your 86U (ignore the AiMesh/node bits for now)... respect the details until you know better....OE

Sorry - really rude of me that it has taken 3 months to thank you for responding! I followed your great install notes that you linked to and all has been great. Really useful set of instructions. Sorry again and thanks for taking the time :) All the best.
 
Sorry - really rude of me that it has taken 3 months to thank you for responding! I followed your great install notes that you linked to and all has been great. Really useful set of instructions. Sorry again and thanks for taking the time :) All the best.

Thank you for the follow-up and acknowledgement... made all the sweeter by the time you allowed to use and observe your new network.

OE
 
wow, suddenly my faith in humanity has been restored.
 

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