Supported region problem - lightening does strike twice :-(

[indieisaconcept]

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone on here might be able to clear up some confusion I have related to what regions are officially supported by asus routers, I'm based in Australia.

Recently I discovered that my RT-AC68u which I purchased back in late 2017 was hardware locked to the US for wlan, Australia is available as a region option under "Wireless > Professional" however it doesn't seem to have any effect on what channels are displayed. I decided to try my luck despite being out of warranty & submitted a support ticket to local asus support & I'm currently in the process of organising for it to be returned to them. Australia has pretty good consumer projection laws so hopefully I should get a good outcome with the return.

Given the routers age I decided to upgrade to an RT-AX86u. I figured if I get the RT-AC68u back I could at least setup a mesh . I made sure to purchase from a local reseller listed on the asus au site to rule out the possibility of being supplied the wrong sku for Australia. Unfortunately it looks like I've been stung by the same issue, albeit a variant.

With the RT-AX86u the following regions are listed (for comparison I've listed those found on the RT-AC68u)

RT-AX86u          | RT-AC68u
Asia (Default)    | Asia (Default)
China             | China
Europe            | Europe
Region GD         | Korea
Korea             | Russia
The United States | Singapore
                  | The United States
                  | Australia

In the instance, Australia isn't event a selectable option. On the plus side changing region here actually does seem to work, wl country even reports correctly for some when the region changes, as do the available channels in the UI.

I did a little experimenting & it seems like the Asia option almost comes close to Australia channels, however with this option wl country reports the USA & some channels are missing. I also discovered that when you view-source of the "Wireless > Professional" page you can also see what regions are supported, which I assume is based on what is set in the firmware. These values are used to dynamically generate the region selector & it should be noted that in the code AU is specified which suggestion Australia is an explicitly supported region by asus.

For comparison.

RT-AX86u                        | RT-AC68u
["AA","CN","EU","GD","KR","US"] | ["AA","CN","EU","KR","RU","SG","US","AU"]

Once again I'm about to kick off a return, this time direct to the reseller as I've only just purchased it.

Is this experience normal? Have I just been unfortunate again or is this a symptom of a much larger issue with asus & its ability to provide units correctly configured for the Australian market?

 

[L&LD]

Did you ask your local reseller about these issues? What did they have to say?

Is there another local reseller that you can talk to?

I would not keep a router that wasn't 'local'. There is no logic there to do so.

Are you sure Australia isn't close (not physically, to specs) to another region that is supported (at least on the new model)?

 

[indieisaconcept]

@L&LD I'm in the process of returning to the reseller now. They'll actually ship it off to asus on my behalf apparently. USA seems closest for 5Gz, only channel 132 is not present. For 2Gz channels 12 & 13 are not available.

I did consider another reseller but given this has occurred to me twice now from different sellers I'm a little weary.

 

[Sachb]

Same issue here, with the AC86U, but mines much worse, I can't use channels 141-161 at all and this the euro version.