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My RT-AC87U experience

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wfhmaster

Occasional Visitor
For anyone whom it might benefit, I kept some notes while setting up and testing this unit. I benefited from everyone whom has posted info about this unit so thought I'd share.


Here are some notes I took while setting up the AC87U...

5g vs 2.4g, 5g is much faster, but drops off quickly at about 25-35ft line of sight or through walls, doesn't seem to matter. 5g doesn't slow down gradually, it just stops working flat out. 2.4g goes very far, 100-150ft+. I have a .5 acre lot and 2.4g covers all of it, whereas 5g barely covers the house interior. The construction of my house is 2x4 and no sheer walls (pray for no earthquakes), so there should be very little interference. However, I do have one addition which is 2x6 with sheer wall. Behind that part of the house the signal only goes about 50ft for 2.4g and is nill for 5g (too far away at that point for 5g anyhow) I do have one other wifi router on a different network in the same room and a 1.9g phone system, but I turned off all those devices and rebooted the AC87U and everything tested out the same. Neighbours are too far away for me to see their wifi in my house... although I'm sure they get mine now!

5g acts flakey when it gets to it's limits, it just fails to respond at all and devices just hang waiting. The odd thing is that the range bars really aren't accurate, you can have 2-3bars and it still flakes out and won't do anything even though showing connected. 2.4g on the other hand can be down to 0-1 bar and still function well. 2.4g is much better with it's behavior when it gets to it's limits. A lot of this probably depends on how your device behaves with weak network connections too.

I tried using the same network settings for 2.4g and 5g but my devices would not seamlessly switch between, it was just more difficult to tell which I was connected to. Maybe not the routers fault, I decided to make the names different so I could tell what I am connected to and can choose the one I want.

AC87U vs linksys 54GL, haha, I know, not really a fair comparison. The AC87U bests the 54GL by about 30-50% more range on 2.4g. The ac87u is much faster obviously, N vs A/B/G amongst other reasons. I had to put the AC87U up about 3ft higher and out of the way of some monitors and other equipment to get it to exceed the 54GL range... which was perfectly happy behind everything... strange. The range is decent, but I'm not blown away from the improvement. Bandwidth is night and day though. The 54GL was choking on all the connections, but the AC87U can handle a lot! I opened several connections to HD IP cams and downloaded GBs of data via SMB/FTP at the same time and nothing slowed down at all.

When changing settings on the router it takes 3min (measured) to reboot, seems like forever after being blessed with 15-20sec reboots on the 10yr+ old Linksys!

During router reboot some services seem to come online then they shut down again, and some turn off and back on a few minutes after the reboot is done too, in particular the 5g wifi at least, maybe even the 2.4g, more testing needed.

I found that anytime I change settings, even simple ones, in the router there is a chance services will flake out during the saving process. A lot of times it worked fine, but others no so much. No biggie, just need to wait a while for things to come up and stay up.

I did not find that I had to reboot the router after saving settings, just needed to wait a few minutes to take effect.

No unwanted reboots so far, but only one day of uptime.

Slick setup interface, works on my android while VPN'd in!!! Very cool!!

I did manage to hork the flash/etc interface once or twice in my browser (IE11) by clicking fast or having too many windows open, but just had to close and reopen.

Upnp auto configured ports don't work on the local network, only over the WAN... or I'm too dumb to find the setting to change that behavior! Not terrible, but annoying, the 54GL didn't behave this way.
**(update on Upnp, my IP cams rebooted the next day and all is working on the local LAN, doesn't appear to be an issue with the router)

DDNS setup with Asus works great so far, have to see once my WAN IP lease comes up and changes.

Managed to lock up the VPN server/service after connecting a few times to test. It took a reboot to fix. Lame, can't do that when I'm remote! VPN would not allow connections when it was broken, worked again after a router reboot.

VPN acts funny on my phone, if I don't connect to something over the connection within a few seconds of connecting it will disconnect. If I open a web browser page to an IP camera/etc it will hold in there, usually. Weird! Not sure if it's the phone or what, more testing needed.

USB 3.0 enable mode has noticeable impact on Wifi range/performance. I had to disable it to have one 2.4ghz IP camera about 35ft away and through several walls get any signal. Bummer!

USB 3.0 vs USB 2.0 performance = 64-72MB/s vs 24-32MB/s respectively via local SMB copy. Not super happy about this but I'm not doing any big steaming stuff... yet. I used a 80-90MB/s+ (as tested over USB 3.0 directly to a computer) capable SSD with a USB 3.0 adapter for this test. Not as big of a deal for slower single spinning disks but a bummer for SSD's.

SMB sharing works for the most part, just had some flakiness with it a couple times (hanging explorer.exe while opening files), hard to say if it was a Windows issue or the way the sharing works on the router.

FTP also works well, no complaints! Just as speedy as SMB both up and down.

The features like VPN, FTP, SMB, etc are really half the reason I wanted this unit and I'm happy with them so far, except the VPN flakiness.

overall the setup, configuration, performance for my 3 IP cams, 1 phone, 1 bluray palyer, and several wired and wireless PC's/Laptops went very smooth, I'm happy enough, but not blown away, to keep it if it keeps behaving with the basic stuff.
 
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I concur.

I immediately loaded RMerlin's 48 beta 3 and have experienced excellent performance. In fact, I'm surprised at the increased 5G strength on all my N devices (no AC clients yet).

Also, I have an RT-N66U acting as a client bridge about 500 feet away behind a metal garage door, and the throughput has increased noticeably.

So far, so good. I suspect and know I owe RMerlin for this.
 
Day 2 update:

-VPN died again within hours of being reset (I just turn it off and back on in the console to reset it). This seems to be a chronic issue. Hope it's fixed in the next FW coming out soon.

-Upnp port config on the local LAN is now working, mysteriously, today. I suspect the IP cameras which use upnp needed to be reset as they all reboot at 9am and it was working after that.
 
Day 3:

-Upnp port config on local LAN broken again, reboot router, reset devices, no change. Weird!!!! It seems to just randomly work and then not work.

-NTP, was getting an error that the time had not been set and the syslog showed Jan1 for date/time stamps. Used the built in ping utility to ping the default NTP server listed and it pinged fine. I put the IP address of the NTP server in the setting instead and it worked... so huh? Ping could resolve the address, but the router couldn't do it somewhere else? Very strange. **Updated... I rebooted the router and it reset the time back to Dec31! WTF? Went back to the NTP setting and figured out you have to manually click Apply at the bottom for it to sync the time. Wonky! You'd think it would automatically sync the time and not forget it on every reboot! Is this how it's supposed to work?

-I maxed out the WAN upload link uploading a video to YouTube and it caused all my other connections to fail to get outside. Pings on other devices showed about 1 of 5 to 1 of 10 pings getting a response. Should I setup Adaptive QoS to resolve this?

-VPN server still failing after a day or so.
 
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Day 3:

-Upnp port config on local LAN broken again, reboot router, reset devices, no change. Weird!!!! It seems to just randomly work and then not work.

I have the same problem with my ip cameras. when you loose the connectivity on the local lan does the connectivity still work over wan?
just asking as my wan connection still works when the upnp goes down.

Most frustrating router i have ever owned.
 
Hi,
I just switched out 2 month old Netgear R7500 which ran trouble-free, with Asus RT-AC87U.
Definitely Asus is little more snappy and faster.
 
I have the same problem with my ip cameras. when you loose the connectivity on the local lan does the connectivity still work over wan?
just asking as my wan connection still works when the upnp goes down.

Most frustrating router i have ever owned.

Yes, WAN connectivity is always maintained (after the cameras do the upnp registration of course). LAN pretty consistently doesn't work, just one time so far it worked... until I rebooted the router.

I have some frustrations, but overall I'm pretty happy. It just sucks when one of the bugs/quirks affects something you care about.
 
Update for the past few days:
Things have been pretty solid, no reboots, no hangs, etc.

I moved my router location slightly and was able to use USB 3.0 mode and still get the 2.4g range I needed. Happy about that!

I switched using OpenVPN and it seems much more solid, no failures so far.

I did experience some major slow downs on outside connections coming in, however I could not isolate if it was the device or the router, other connections seemed fast still, so hmmm.. for now.

Playing with the AiCloud stuff, very cool, but not sure how secure!

Loving the feature set so far! Overall very happy with the recent adjustments above.
 
What sold me are the security features. Every time I click a spam message the router blocks it.

I work with small businesses and I'm trying to get them all on these.:D

openvpn tun works perfectly. But I need tap, and that tends to DC me every once in a while. Which is ok, but TUN is definitely the way to go.
 
Update.

I've gotten the router to not reboot using the console reboot button a few times now. After counting down it comes up with a message stating:

"Settings have been updated. Web page will now refresh.
Changes have been made to the IP address or port number. You will now be disconnected from RT-AC87U.
To access the settings of RT-AC87U, reconnect to the wireless network and use the updated IP address and port number."

However, I am unable to reconnect to the router and it does not recover, no networking is taking place. At this point I switch it off physically and it boots back up fine.

I looked at the log immediately after it happened and saw that it hung unmounting the SSD I connected via USB 3.0. It indicated there were errors on the disk. I have not even used the disk since the last check and no unexpected reboots happened (at least by me or the power going out---I have it on UPS). Might be something for others to check when it won't reboot from the soft button. I've now scheduled a regular disk check daily. I am curious how the files were corrupted though... looks like index files it was using for some music files I have on the disk.

Now it gets better, the whole reason I was going to reboot was because the wifi was acting up, range was reduced and throughput was lessened. I'm also seeing the same errors others have mentioned:

"Dead loop on virtual device vlan2, fix it urgently!"

I'm seeing several of these a second continuously, that can't be good, even if the error it's logging is benign... just the resources to keep logging it are pretty significant.

Hoping the next FW comes out soon and fixes this stuff. I've had instability in the networking a few times now. Sometimes it sorts itself out after a while, sometimes I have to reboot.
 
Those exact same things happen to me.

If I add too many static ip's for dhcp, when it reboots it doesn't come back up. Very irksome when I am configuring remotely.

It's pretty annoying, but compared to what was replaced, it's something I can tolerate.
 
More observations...

I went to see if the soft reboot option would work today, and it did not. I think it had only been about 48hrs since the last reboot(hard).

Interestingly when it tries to soft reboot and fails everything seems to shut down, except, I noticed the 5G network stays active, but doesn't give out IP's! This might be a clue that the wireless part of the router is hanging the reboot sequence specifically the 5G part, as the 2.4G is not present at that time.

Anyway, just to rule out that it was not happening 100% of the time, I rebooted shortly after the first reboot and the soft reboot worked fine!! So it seems as time goes by, a relatively short time at that, the router breaks in some way and won't soft reboot successfully... and it may be related to the 5G wifi.

I also noticed that WOL fails after a time as well.

Looking at the log I can find no indication that there is trouble, just the same old errors about dead loop on vlan and net rate limit.

I have to agree at this point that the router is somewhat unstable, even without making changes.
 
I purchased one for myself, and tested it thoroughly and found it to be exceptional.

I installed one for a client and it has been a massive headache. It's a much larger system with 3 Aps connected to it. All 3 work, but one isn't responding or showing up in the dhcp client list. (But it is working.) I started suspecting foul play so I switched the language to Chinese.
The router has crashed about 4 times, 3 of which I had to have someone on site reboot it.
I am considering another vendor for my client, but nothing seems to come close to what we need. Dual Wan failover is a must, and it has saved our collective bacon more than once already.
 
I purchased one for myself, and tested it thoroughly and found it to be exceptional.

I installed one for a client and it has been a massive headache. It's a much larger system with 3 Aps connected to it. All 3 work, but one isn't responding or showing up in the dhcp client list. (But it is working.) I started suspecting foul play so I switched the language to Chinese.
The router has crashed about 4 times, 3 of which I had to have someone on site reboot it.
I am considering another vendor for my client, but nothing seems to come close to what we need. Dual Wan failover is a must, and it has saved our collective bacon more than once already.

For Dual WAN I've had good success with my own customers and the Cisco RV042. Just pair it with another router (like an Asus) set up as an AP.

I think Linksys now has their own similar product (Tim reviewed it recently I believe), but I have no experience with that one so I can't comment.
 
For Dual WAN I've had good success with my own customers and the Cisco RV042. Just pair it with another router (like an Asus) set up as an AP.

I think Linksys now has their own similar product (Tim reviewed it recently I believe), but I have no experience with that one so I can't comment.

Thanks, I will look in to that!:D

I am also looking for something comparable bc the 87u has the "nextgen" firewall security features like the A/V, and malware device lockout as well as the active spam website blocking.
 
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Thanks, I will look in to that!:D

I am also looking for something comparable bc the 87u has the "nextgen" firewall security features like the A/V, and malware device lockout as well as the active spam website blocking.

This is something you will have a hard time finding, unless going with higher-end business class products I'm afraid where firewalls will come with IPS.
 
This is something you will have a hard time finding, unless going with higher-end business class products I'm afraid where firewalls will come with IPS.

I tried a pfsense build, but it was crazy unstable. I also noticed their gateway filtering stopped receiving updates for definitions a long time ago.

I really think the 87u is a bargain for those features alone.
 
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