Bro, you are a God among men. I changed the SSID and it is blazing now. Thank you very much. So you do recommend the Merlin beta? I might have to try that out sometime. I have another question on the regular firmware. Does it help to increase the default power from 80? If so what do you all recommend the maximum that it be set, too? I really appreciate your all's help!
p.s. do you find that you get better speeds with it set to 20/40/80 and the channel to auto? I always thought the highest MHz and highest channel(161) always gave the best performance, but I admit I am not an expert on this stuff.
LOL - Glad to be of help, but I think this pretty much underlines what I saw - the radio firmware is not as good at dealing with 'chatty' clients.
I have theory that the ISKAMP key rotation is different or has something slightly different in it between vendors , so the effect is that the client that connected fine to the Netgear, can only partially negotiate the WPA2/AES connection phase and then it falls back and retries. The repeated connect / disconnect / connect / disconnect is 'swamping' the radio and basically preventing it serving real traffic (I hasten to add this is my *theory*, not sure if Thiggins drops by this thread, if he has any thoughts).
Anways, I can tell you 20/40/80 should appropriate the best setup for your local environment - although yes, the higher channels do give the best performance but it is very environmental, depending on what other wireless networks and interference are in the area (should be minimal interference with 5ghz compared to 2ghz).
In my experience you have to watch increasing the power as it will also increase the SNR ratio and as you saw reduce the throughput in some cases - I have read other threads where people actually get better throughput by lowering the TX power (using DD-WRT people reported 71mw gave the best results). Personally I get the best results with both radios at 100mw, but then again most of my clients are a fair distance away. (100mw is a number I came up with as comparable to the old Apple Airport devices I used to use in conjunction with the WNDR3700)
I would strongly recommend the merlin beta, because it is essentially the ASUS firmware with some code and feature corrections that Merlin has made (often with input and review from ASUS themselves). Its not a 3rd party build as with DD-WRT, but is just a 'patched ASUS' build.
Right now the beta (v3.0.0.4.354.29) has the next-generation wireless drivers (warning: they are in beta) so you don't get the 100% uptime, but I do get significantly better stability on my 5Ghz.
If you want to play it safe then run the (3.0.0.4.270.26b) with the older drivers, as they have fewer issues with different clients.
I should say the beta runs fine with all my clients, but you might just have to try it and see in your own setup.
When you switch between builds I would always recommend a factory default reset - just to make sure you are always using the correct NVRAM variables.
As a final note on the clients, I dont know of any easy way to remove the wireless profiles easily - a lot of my clients are embedded (dropcam HD , printers etc) which means the only real way to be sure is to manually re-setup the wireless profile on each one (hence the new SSID gives you a point of reference). Personally I prefer this anyway as after every client i add, I re-run the speedtest - and it if dies, then I have a pretty good idea of which one is causing the issue.
