ac68u 2.4ghz woes - turn beamforming off

[ssahnan]

2.4 ghz on the router for me has been fine up until yesterday's fw update. But after adding .339 yesterday, my range has gone down to about 10 feet if that.

Asus has been releasing and pulling fw's a few times lately. I believe .291 and .306 added beamforming but i'm curious if they were pulled because beamforming wasn't properly added/working. I am questioning that because up until .339, beamforming was activated and my range was fine. Installed .339 and my range died with again, beamforming still enabled. after resetting the router and tinkering with every other setting, turning the beamforming options off have brought back my 2.4ghz speeds and range.

I'm not a networking guru so I don't the explanation why but I do know others are struggling with 2.4ghz woes so wanted to throw at there as a possible option to try.

what a troublesome router/stretch of fw's asus is going through lately. Loyalty kept me with asus when I tried both this and the r7000 and had better stability with the netgear. another few weeks, loyalty be damned, i'll go back.

 

[sijuthomas98]

Mine .339 has been the best for 2.4Ghz for me range and throughput. For the first time I'm able to choose channels on N only and get such speeds on 40mhz earlier it was full speed only on 20mhz. I can paste my settings for u if you care to test. 15 devices connected 3 on AC rest on N.

 

[ssahnan]

i'll give it a shot sure, thanks..

 

[RMerlin]

I would recommend disabling beamforming on the 2.4 GHz band but keeping it enabled on the 5 GHz band. There were suspicions that the 2.4 GHz beamforming might have been part of the reason for Tim's poor performance on the 2.4 GHz band, so Asus added an option to disable it.

Beamforming has been there from the beginning, Asus just added an option to disable it on the 2.4 GHz band.

The main reason for pulling 291/306 was the fact that it was crashing when people were running torrents with HW acceleration enabled.

 

[sijuthomas98]

Can confirm that signal gets dodgy when there is interference in 2.4g 40mhz. I set it manually to another channel and things are better. Auto goes to channel 6 and that's very congested in my Apartment as every network is on 6. 1 and 11 manual with 20 or 40mhz works well. But sometimes if a new network pops up have to change channel again. Using .339

 

[noric]

I'm interested in the RT-AC68U and I'd like to know how the 2.4GHz beamforming is working now after a few years. Is it working good? Is the AC68U any better than the N66U in the 2.4GHz band?
Thanks.