RT-AC68U (random sluggish wifi during Facetime)

[Poseidon]

Just picked up the RT-AC68U a few days ago (using .542 factory firmware) and for the most part it's been working great - except for a hiccup when I "Facetime" from my Apple device.

About every couple of days during a Facetime session (connected via 5GHz wireless), I notice that the picture would get extremely choppy/sluggish with a "reconnecting" message popping up.

When this occurs, ALL of my other connected devices (all wireless, no wired connections) would come to a crawl as well. My PC takes forever to pull up a web page. This would last for 2-3 minutes and then my connection would come back to normal/fast speeds again.

Any idea of what might be causing this when using Facetime and might there be a "settings tweak" on the RT-AC68U that might resolve it?

Edit: Also want to mention that my ISP (Charter) came out last week and ran a new RG6 line from the pole into my house and put new connections at the pole as well. I also purchased a new Moto SB6141 modem (white retail) and had it provisioned. My signal and numbers are "excellent" according to Charter. HSI speeds are 30/4 BTW.

I'm 99.9% certain that this issue is related to the router.

 

[sinshiva]

have you tried enabling 'Optimize ack suppression' under the 'professional' settings? also, make sure WMM is enabled.

you could also try QoS;

wipe the default ports, set bandwidth for everything on the priorities page to 100%, and use the following;

53 both highest
80 both high
443 both high
3478:3497 udp highest
5223 tcp high
16384:16387 udp highest
16393:16402 udp highest

for the auto page bandwidth settings, you can either set your actual up and down speeds if you intend to play with limiting bandwidth later, or just set both to 1000, which is what i've been using

 

[Poseidon]

I enabled Optimize APMDU Aggregation + Optimize Ack Suppression on both bands. Not too much info is available on these 2 features/settings but another forum member (L&LD) also recommended to enable them.

I don't want to mess w/ QoS quite yet as I know if it's not used right that it could do more harm than good.

Any RT-AC68U user that can recommend a good/reliable firmware to use with this router?

I'm currently running .542 stock firmware - but if there's anything BETTER out there - I'm all ears!

Thanks.

 

[KGB7]

542 firmware?? Isnt that the beta firmware that Asus has removed from their site a month ago??

 

[Poseidon]

542 firmware?? Isnt that the beta firmware that Asus has removed from their site a month ago??

I hope not. I saw a link posted here a couple of days ago and I thought I'd give it a go since the latest 583 firmware was buggy (as reported by others).

What's a good firmware to use (old factory, new factory or Merlins).

 

[KGB7]

It was posted exactly a month ago 1/4/14, and Asus pulled it from having too many issues.


So yeah.... you have two choices; oem 583 or Merlin 39.