AnClar
Regular Contributor
When OEMs bring new technology to the market, they like to trumpet that they are "backward-compatible" and will work "seamlessly" with not only legacy technology, but also with other vendors' products. As many of us know, that marketing hype in many cases turns out to be just that...hype. It is, for me at least, still the rule as I discovered with the BE standard, wifi7 and interoperability.
I was running a mixed network with AC, and AX routers. It was a stable setup, covering approx. 4000 sq. ft. and approx 50 clients, including a mix of IoT stuff, and various computers. Because of a number of factors, out of my control, I had to use wireless backhaul. Not my ideal choice but serviceable. I was able to use a 5Ghz DWB and everything worked. My end users (wife, guests) were happy with network performance, and I only had to spend small amounts of time keeping things humming along smoothly.
The issues began when my core router, a GT-AXE16000 began to have what turned out to be fatal h/w issues. Rather than replace like with like, I decided to take the future-proof route and invest in a GT-BE98 pro as the new core router. And so the problems began. My once stable network went totally downhill. Clients disconnected at random, mesh nodes would appear and disappear also seemingly at random. I tried factory resetting everything and reconfiguring. Didn't help. Disabled wifi7 mode, didn't help. Nothing I did helped and so I was left with a completely unreliable network. Claims of interoperability were just smoke and mirrors.
I decided to go ahead and replace all my network mesh nodes with BE level h/w. Lo and behold, I'm now back to as stable and reliable a network as I had before this all began. Takeaway: even though the BE standard and wifi7 are relatively new tech, individual components, preferably from the same vendor, seem to work well together, at least they do for me. I realize I may be stating the obvious, but I'm once again reminded to believe almost nothing that comes out of a marketing department to sell products. I'll admit, I was a bit concerned by some of the comments here about issues folks have been having with Asus BE products. Still, in my relatively vanilla setup, I've had very good luck with the new Asus BE h/w. As ever, YMMV.
I was running a mixed network with AC, and AX routers. It was a stable setup, covering approx. 4000 sq. ft. and approx 50 clients, including a mix of IoT stuff, and various computers. Because of a number of factors, out of my control, I had to use wireless backhaul. Not my ideal choice but serviceable. I was able to use a 5Ghz DWB and everything worked. My end users (wife, guests) were happy with network performance, and I only had to spend small amounts of time keeping things humming along smoothly.
The issues began when my core router, a GT-AXE16000 began to have what turned out to be fatal h/w issues. Rather than replace like with like, I decided to take the future-proof route and invest in a GT-BE98 pro as the new core router. And so the problems began. My once stable network went totally downhill. Clients disconnected at random, mesh nodes would appear and disappear also seemingly at random. I tried factory resetting everything and reconfiguring. Didn't help. Disabled wifi7 mode, didn't help. Nothing I did helped and so I was left with a completely unreliable network. Claims of interoperability were just smoke and mirrors.
I decided to go ahead and replace all my network mesh nodes with BE level h/w. Lo and behold, I'm now back to as stable and reliable a network as I had before this all began. Takeaway: even though the BE standard and wifi7 are relatively new tech, individual components, preferably from the same vendor, seem to work well together, at least they do for me. I realize I may be stating the obvious, but I'm once again reminded to believe almost nothing that comes out of a marketing department to sell products. I'll admit, I was a bit concerned by some of the comments here about issues folks have been having with Asus BE products. Still, in my relatively vanilla setup, I've had very good luck with the new Asus BE h/w. As ever, YMMV.
