Have you had a trouble with your RT-AC86U AiMesh? Try asking them to fix it for you.
Have you had a trouble with your RT-AC86U AiMesh? Try asking them to fix it for you.
Hey everyone, I got two AC86U routers set up for AiMesh. The main router is on the ground floor, and the node goes up to the first floor via ethernet. There are 25 devices in total, but 15 of them are wireless home stuff like lights and doorbells that don't have a LAN connection. Both routers run the newest firmware version (3.0.0.4.386_48260), they use separate SSIDs for 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, and smart connect is turned off. I'm using all these settings on default.
I've been running this whole system for about half a year, but every single week the main router loses all my wireless connections. The devices then reconnect to the node, and that fixes it just by rebooting them. In this case, the furthest away devices get very weak signal and show up as offline randomly. This problem only shows up with WiFi stuff; anything that's wired stays connected forever.
I tried binding all those devices to the main router, but when the WiFi drops they still don't go back to the node. I reset both routers hard or factory settings a lot of times too. I even swapped the order and put them closer together, nothing worked. After just a couple of days, the main router kills off all wireless devices again.
I tried setting it up as Router-AP mode instead, but the same thing happens. Before this problem started, I had two TPlink Archer C7 routers in AP mode, and I never had this issue. I have no idea what else to try, so I'm really hoping someone here can help me fix this.
It would be really nice if these devices had more logging information. Unfortunately, all this kind of info is locked up in the wifi radio chip and even the router makers can't see it unless the wifi chip maker chooses to send those details to the router. Do you know if losing both the 2.4 GHz and 5G radios causes this? It could be a hardware problem, but then swapping them shouldn't do the same thing. If it was something more basic like the router crashing your wired connections, that would also happen. The easier way to force devices where you want is to use different SSIDs on the main and remote routers. They should only connect to the one you configured being sure the device doesn't have the other one set too. This stops them from switching unless you manually tell it to switch. I'm not sure if that's related to the mesh software. Honestly, I hate that stuff. The end device isn't responsible for where it connects; the network is. Since these mesh systems can't actually tell a device where to connect, sometimes they force a device off the network and hope it finds a better source. If it's possible, I would disable any mesh abilities and run the units as simple routers with a remote AP.
Thanks for getting back to me quickly! Yes, I sure lose both 2.4 and 5g radios when things go wrong, and all my connected devices just try to reconnect to the node again. The weird part is that this same thing happens in router AP mode too, but less often. It's always the main router that drops the connection first. At first, I guessed it might be bad hardware and even asked the store to replace my device with a new one. But since then, I've swapped both the router and the node around with no luck at all.
Sounds like a great move. I need to test the Merlin FW on those devices too. Will this help fix the problem?