ASUS RT-N66U - wireless goes "down" for a few seconds once in a while

[rbbraz]

Hi all,

I have this router for about a year now, and I recently left it turned off for a couple weeks (since I was away). Ever since then (could just be a coincidence I guess), the router goes through bouts of extreme slowness/dropping packets - whenever this happens I get DCed from online games, even the router page is extremely slow to load, etc.

I tried updating the firmware, and it did not help. Also tried Merlin's firmware and it seemed better (happens less often), but did not fix the issue completely. I haven't yet tried the Tomato firmware, not sure it would help.

Initially I thought it might be my wireless adapter, but I tried it with another router in client bridged mode (instead of the adapter) and I still had the same issue (even though the throughput was way higher in this mode). Another computer in the house has seen similar behavior, but less often - I would say it could be just because it is less noticeable for them than it is for me.

One thing I did not try was a 5ghz adapter (I might try it with another router in a 5ghz client bridged configuration) to see if only the 2.4 band is an issue. Connecting to another 2.4 router instead of the Asus I seem to have no issues, so I'm pretty sure it is either something in my router itself or with its 2.4 configuration.


I did change the location of the router before the 2-week shut down thing (it is 3 or 4 meters farther now), but signal still seems to be pretty strong and I had no issues then (or just did not notice them..).

Is there anything I can try for stability here (or any extra information I should get?)? I don't mind sacrificing some throughput - if I can get 40mpbs up/down it is more than enough, I just can't deal with connection drops

 

[wouterv]

Perform both following steps:

1. Set the router back to factory defaults and re-configure the router manually (do NOT load an old configuration file), start with a bare minimal configuration to avoid odd seldom used configuration combinations.
2. Delete the wireless profile at the client side and re-connect to your SSID -or- configure a new SSID in your router and connect your clients to this new SSID.

 

[rbbraz]

I cannot do this right now (at work), but when I flashed in Merlin's firmware I actually reset it back to factory default and changed the SSID to configure a new one.

However, I did configure it as instructed in a few posts I found with similar issues (fixed channel to 1, a bit more power, using 40MHz if I remember correctly).

I'm thinking I will do it once more and configure my router-access point to use the 5 ghz band to see if it works better.