RT-AX88U Network not available for AX on AIMesh

[GMPeet]

I own two ASUS RT-AX88U devices.
One, downstairs, is configured to be my Router
One, on the top floor of my house, is configured to be an AIMesh node connected by wire to this router

When I first set up the AIMesh node I could connect to both the router and the AIMesh node, using AX 160 MHz bandwidth.

I have sinds then always updated it with the latest Merlin firmware available.

When I scan my WiFi networks both Router and AIMesh are visible.

Comparing the router and AiMesh broadcast,
I find three tagged parameters in the Router broadcast that are missing in the AiMesh SSID broadcast:
1 - Advertisement protocol -> "ANQP"
2 - Operation mode notification -> "Channel Width 80 Mhz, Rx NSS: 3Nss, RxNSS type 0x0"
3 - Vendor specific -> "Wi-Fi Alliance"

My phone connects to both the Router and the AIMesh node fine using AC and WPA2.
But my AX devices (Laptop with Intel AX200 and Intel NUC with AX201 using latest Intel drivers 21.80.2) both do no longer connect to the AIMesh node.
Using these devices, I can see the AIMesh node but when I want to connect, they both report "Cannot connect to this network".

I have tried setting both AX adapters to use AC instead of AX, but they still will not connect to the AIMesh node.

But downstairs they connect fine to the Router, with excellent speeds.
I assume the node has the same settings passed on as the router.
Therefor it is a puzzel to me why my AX devices no longer connect to the AIMesh node but my phone still does.

At this point they both are on firmware 384.18_alpha1, but I reverted to 384.15 - 384.16 and 3.84.17 and that did not solve the connection issue I am facing.

 

[L&LD]

I don't see a separate AiMesh node with an RT-AX88U and an RT-AX58U when they are in wired AiMesh mode?

Remove the node, remove all USB devices from the node, and then do a full reset to factory defaults/Initialize all settings and then don't touch the node at all after it reboots.

From the main router, 'point' to the node you want to add and after it has connected and configured it, reboot the entire network at least twice (at about 15 minutes and after an hour after that) and wait a good 10 minutes afterward to allow the AiMesh and both routes to settle.

You are running the same firmware on both routers, correct?

If the above still gives issues, you may want to repeat the above along with a 'format the JFFS partition on next boot', followed by three reboots in the next 15 minutes or so.

HTH.

 

[GMPeet]

Today I have done a factory reset of the RT-AX88U AiMesh node on Merlin firmware 384.18_alpha1 and reconnected it to my router.
Issue was still there.

I now have tried changing some settings in the router.
I had WPA2/WPA3-Personal Authentication set in my router.
When I changed the setting to WPA2-personal, my AX devices connected again to the AiMesh node using AX 160 Mhz.

Also, when I tried to replicate the issue by setting the router back to WPA2/WPA3-Personal there was a message:
"When using WPA2/WPA3-Personal Authentication, your AiMesh system will become invalid.
Do you want to proceed?"

I did not proceed at this point as it seems to be a known limitation.
For now I will use WPA2 on my AX devices.