3.0.0.4.354.27 best release to date

[cmillar6]

I do believe Merlins latest build is the best firmware I have used on a router to date. My 5Ghz signal has been rock solid and is just as strong through two floors. I realize this is the work of the new driver Asus provided but the stock firmware just doesn't have the extra little goodies Merlin adds. I may have to pick up USB AC53 now but I'm worried it wont work on my Linux laptop. Great work Merlin, please don't roll back the driver because of a few isolated complaints.

 

[bluepoint]

I do believe Merlins latest build is the best firmware I have used on a router to date. My 5Ghz signal has been rock solid and is just as strong through two floors. I realize this is the work of the new driver Asus provided but the stock firmware just doesn't have the extra little goodies Merlin adds. I may have to pick up USB AC53 now but I'm worried it wont work on my Linux laptop. Great work Merlin, please don't roll back the driver because of a few isolated complaints.

Yes, I have to agree the 5GHz wireless is performing real strong in 354. inSSIDer says my link score is 100.

 

[RMerlin]

My laptop won't even connect at all to the RT-N66U's 5 GHz, so this driver is definitely badly broken (while the RT-AC66U has been working perfectly).

Build 27 was focussing on the new firmware and new wireless driver. The current plan is to stay at build 27 in beta stage for as long it will take for the wireless driver to be fixed to at least be functional. I don't expect it to work perfectly for every single user, but so long it's at least as good as the previous one, that's what matters to me.

The good news is my contact at Asus was able to reproduce some of the issues I reported. He'll get in touch with Taiwan about it, I'll let everyone know once I get any news.

 

[bluepoint]

The good news is my contact at Asus was able to reproduce some of the issues I reported. He'll get in touch with Taiwan about it, I'll let everyone know once I get any news.

That's good news indeed so Asus can deal with the bug. It's probably working for mine cause my client has a Broadcom chipset. It's also working good with the apple products in my network.

 

[RMerlin]

That's good news indeed so Asus can deal with the bug. It's probably working for mine cause my client has a Broadcom chipset. It's also working good with the apple products in my network.

It does seem to depend on the client chipset. He saw similar issues with an Intel 5100, but had no trouble with a recent Apple mobile product. He'll forward the info to the FW devs back at HQ.

 

[cmillar6]

How could Asus botch the driver so badly for RTN66U ??

 

[bluepoint]

It does seem to depend on the client chipset. He saw similar issues with an Intel 5100, but had no trouble with a recent Apple mobile product. He'll forward the info to the FW devs back at HQ.

Good stuff at least the bug is identified. Hopefully, the fix is soon so everybody is happy.

 

[RMerlin]

How could Asus botch the driver so badly for RTN66U ??

They didn't "botch" it. They released it as "beta". And it doesn't exhibit the problem with every devices, only some specific ones.

 

[Builder71]

I do believe Merlins latest build is the best firmware I have used on a router to date.
.... please don't roll back the driver because of a few isolated complaints.

-1 for you. Not the best build.

Pretty selfish comment if you ask me.
Thank you.

 

[dmillerzx]

Merlin,

How do you feel about the 2.4ghz drivers on the N66U?

Other users have reported that the signal drops many have been experiencing have been resolved. I too suffer from the erratic dbm drops reported in the thread below.

http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=8972

 

[RMerlin]

Merlin,

How do you feel about the 2.4ghz drivers on the N66U?

Other users have reported that the signal drops many have been experiencing have been resolved. I too suffer from the erratic dbm drops reported in the thread below.

http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=8972

I only use my RT-N66U for development, so I don't spend enough time connected to it to really tell. The 5 GHz issue was visible right off the bat as I was totally unable to connect.

 

[DaveMishSr]

My RT-AC66U started off fine on 354.27 Beta but went quickly down hill. The 5GHz band was very unstable. I tried reflashing twice, clearing the NVRAM both before and after flashing on the last attempt and I manually reconfigured my settings twice. The result was the same, very poor WiFi performance on the 5GHz band and even the 2.4GHz band started slowing down. I am staying at 270.26b for now.

 

[RMerlin]

My RT-AC66U started off fine on 354.27 Beta but went quickly down hill. The 5GHz band was very unstable. I tried reflashing twice, clearing the NVRAM both before and after flashing on the last attempt and I manually reconfigured my settings twice. The result was the same, very poor WiFi performance on the 5GHz band and even the 2.4GHz band started slowing down. I am staying at 270.26b for now.

What wireless interface? Everything is rock solid for me so far with the Centrino 6230 in my laptop, connecting to the 5 GHz band. I use it for both RDesktop and SSH.

 

[bluepoint]

Other users have reported that the signal drops many have been experiencing have been resolved. I too suffer from the erratic dbm drops reported in the thread below.

2.4GHz for me with 354.27 is just as par with the 270 driver the only difference is the noise(dBm) went up by 10 pts.(-91dBm).

 

[DaveMishSr]

What wireless interface? Everything is rock solid for me so far with the Centrino 6230 in my laptop, connecting to the 5 GHz band. I use it for both RDesktop and SSH.

It didn't matter Merlin. I have a Centrino Wireless-N 1030 and a Netgear A6200 USB 802.11AC adapter in this laptop. My other laptop has a Centrino Ultimate 6300 and a D-Link DWA-182 USB 802.11AC adapter. Both of my laptops were affected as was my wife's work laptop, my daughter's brand new HP laptop, my daughter's PC of which I don't know its configuration and a secondary household desktop. Only the household's main PC was unaffected but that has two wireless adapters as well as a hard-wired Ethernet connection. All of the affected systems started off great but 5GHz performance almost immediately degraded to useless and 2.4GHz performance also started great but then slowed to barely useful. Whenever bandwidth was limited due to heavy usage then all wireless clients would slow to a crawl so badly as to be unusable. My wife finally insisted on us going back to 270.26b so she could connect to her systems at work remotely in the event on an incident

 

[HTMLSpinnr]

Conversely, both my Nexus 4 (Qualcomm/Murata SS2908001 802.11*a/b/g/n Wi‐Fi) and an early 2011 MacBook Pro (AirPort Extreme - Broadcom BCM43xx based) both seem to work just fine on UNII-3 channels (Auto-selected) and set to 40MHz running the 27b version. I did do a factory reset after the upgrade and manually reconfigured the router.

I haven't noticed any real instability with either devices. Everything else is running on 2.4GHz.

 

[oric1]

On my iPhone 5, the 2.4 & 5HGz is very stable, however, on my iPad 3, I'm now getting around 2Mbps on the 5GHz, there's no problem with 2.4GHz. Before the upgrade, I'm able to get around 40Mbps on 270.26. The iPad is just next to the N66.

 

[vdemarco]

On my iPhone 5, the 2.4 & 5HGz is very stable, however, on my iPad 3, I'm now getting around 2Mbps on the 5GHz, there's no problem with 2.4GHz. Before the upgrade, I'm able to get around 40Mbps on 270.26. The iPad is just next to the N66.

I have all Apple Devices and on my RT-AC66U, after 2 days the speed drops a whole bunch.

The transmit rate goes from (243 to 81), on the 5Ghz channel.

Now this is way better than the previous release cuz my retina macbook, would sometimes not want to connect to the router. For now i can live with this rebooting after 2 days or so.

Since the wireless driver is still being working on by Asus, (i am assuming that that is the problem)

Also thanks for all of the work Merlin, your efforts do make this a much better router.

 

[antdes45]

Yep, definitely an improvement, other than the 5GHz bugs.

I had to reset the NVRAM when upgrading to be able to use static DNS IPv4 servers, otherwise, nothing would work.

As for both 2.4 and 5 GHz settings, I can choose the channel, but the upper/lower channel settings are completely ignored and it's always set to auto.

About the wireless performance, I would get 450Mbps on 2.4 and 5 GHz using a Centrino 6300 with the latest 15.6.1 drivers before the upgrade, but now, I'm stuck to 150 or 180 Mbps on the 5GHz band. It looks like MIMO might not be working or something. File transfers are much slower suddenly.

No problems as far as temperature is concerned. I get stable temps between 55 and 58.

 

[doubleroll]

Rock solid for me on both bands and I never reset NVRAM. I have PCE-AC66 on Win8, Apple iphone, ipad, Win7 laptop, googleTV, Sony BD streaming players, Nexus7, etc. I do have it in AP mode with FiOS router if that matters...