Asus ZenWifi XT8 weak connection between two nodes in the same room

[cmodin]

Hi all!

My setup is as follows; I have one node/router (A) on the ground floor. On the
second floor, I have two nodes (B and C). B and C are located in the same room
(not the final setup, but it is the way it is right now), at opposite walls. The B node
is hard wired to node A on the ground floor. The distance between nodes B and C
is no more than 25 ft and there are no walls or furniture blocking, i.e. it's a clear
line of sight between B and C. Despite this, node C insists on connecting to node
A on the ground floor. The distance between C and A is at least three times the
distance between B and C, and they are on different floors. C connects to A on
2.4Ghz and the connection quality is (obviously) weak.

Anyone got any ideas ? I have tried shutdown/restart of all nodes but the end
result is still the same. Sometimes node C connects to node B at first, but then
it connects to node A after a short while.

Is there a way to force (back haul) connection of a node to a specific node ?

The firmware version that I'm using is 3.0.0.4.386_25790.

Any input is welcome. Thank's in advance!

 

[L&LD]

Move one of the nodes.

Or turn it off. This isn't an expected setup for the algorithm, I'm sure.

 

[oldguy]

I had a similar problem with two XT8’s and a GT-AC5300.
I found that the primary XT8 stopped responding forcing the second XT8 to connect to the GT-AC5300
I also found that during the XT8 node configuration that it only connected at 2.4GHz, I also found the GT-AC5300 also connected to the primary node with 2.4GHz.
I found that that doing a hard reset on all 3 devices and then doing a full primary router configuration before adding the nodes allowed me to get the two mesh nodes to connect on 5GHz backhaul.

You can prioritize Ethernet backhaul in the AI mesh screen, by selecting Node B in the AI mesh MAP, as in the default Auto Prioritization, the Second 5GHz radio may be selected if it has a strong connection to Node A which may give higher throughput.

One easy test is to power down Nodes B and C, and then power on node B, wait for B to fully power on and connect to the router node A. Then power on Node C, which should connect to Node B On the second 5Hz radio.

If you power up node A, and then power on nodes B & C more or less simultaneously if C starts to look for the Node A before Node B is up and running it may connect to Node A.

On the occasion that Node C switches from Node B to Node A, I also saw this type of behavior which seemed to be associated with the primary router glitching, which in my system seemed to be when the primary router used memory was approaching 500MB, which with the XT8 only having 512MB of Dram create a number of issues, such as a swap file crash or memory allocation failure.

I returned my XT8’s after multiple threads with ASUS support and firmware updates, when the top side decorative finish started to delaminate from the plastic case.

I hope that this gives you some things to try to figure out what is going on.

 

[rareohs]

Same problem here but even more extreme in terms of distances. My setup:

XT8.1 (ie the 1st XT 8, which is the router) --across the house--> XT8.2 --to the garage--> XT8.3 --across the driveway to the shop --> XD4.1 (ie the 1st XD4) -- over to the barn--> XD4.2

Geographically it's a straight line between the 3rd XT 8 (XT8.3) to the 1st XD4, and then continuing along that straight line to the 2nd XD4. The distance between XT8.3 and XD4.1 is like 100' or something, and another 100' along the same trajectory to the XD4.2.

Despite it being double the distance, the XD4.2 autoconnects to the XT8.3 instead of XD4.1.


visually it's doing this:

XT8.3-----------------xd4.1
|
|
|
|
|
xd4.2


instead of this:

XT8.3-------------xd4.1--------------xd4.2



good lord i hope that made some sense LOL

 

[oldguy]

I saw a thread posted by @L&LD, about choosing between an older and a newer router, that made me stop and think about why some of these weird things might be happening in your Zenwifi XT8 network, and my own RT-AX89/GT AC5300 network.

Each node has upstream and downstream data, driven by the units that are attached to it, if the router mesh node is looking at the traffic from the attached nodes and the capability of the the wireless backhaul between the mesh nodes this weird connectivity may be a result of load balancing on the primary router.

Since the source code if open sourced and available for download I wonder if it might be worth while digging into this or whether I get my old laptop out and fire up wire shark to dig into this.