ASUS AIMESH issues and dual wan

[octopulse]

Hi

Welcome to my home networking saga that's been driving a little mad for nearly a year. Im hoping the brainstrust here will be kind enough to help me with several Asus ai mesh issues.

As background we have a three story home, steel, with steel studs and no ethernet cabling. We're still on fttn max load is 61Mbps down, 19Mbps up. Lots of issues getting fttp upgrade, Starlink won't work as we're on a hill that blocks the southern sky and 5G coverage works but latency and jitter cause intermittent drop outs. We have three people wfh / school often on video calls simultaneously - unsurprisingly we're maxxed out on the nbn line, and hence making sure the home network is as good as possible matters.

I have several Asus modem routers accumulated over the past 10 years that took me down the ai mesh path - dsl ax82u (current main modem router) and numerous ai mesh nodes: dsl-ac68u, rt ac68u, rt-ac86u and 3 rp ax58's.

Aside from the fight to get fttp saga, I'm trying to get the kit I have to work as well as possible. The dsl line comes in through 1 rj11 jack on the second floor (no other phone points in the entire 325m2 house, bizarre). I've used several tp link powerline adapters to get 1g lan backhaul to all of the nodes and they all work, except the dsl ac68u which doesn't work with wired backhaul as an ai mesh node. I've actually turned that off now and the wifi set up slightly improved.

I have a few key questions that I'm hoping someone can help answer as I can't find answers online

1) I'm using the 4/5g usb tethering function which works sometimes for failover, however, there's better 5g reception upstairs. Unfortunately there's no way to usb tether back to the dsl ax82u. Can the second WAN usb tethered phone be attached to one of the other router nodes? There doesn't appear to be a way of doing this via the node usb application part of the asus router log in for ai mesh? I tried with the ac86u but it 4g tethering didn't show as an option?

2) At present there's lots of overlap in the 2.4 and 5 GHz wifi signals across some nodes as they're all using the same channels - if i switch to access points rather than ai mesh will i then be able to separate out the channels for each node to 1,6, 11 for 2.4ghz? I think I'm correct that there's no way to stop the ai mesh set up pushing all the nodes onto the same channels?

3) I had a bunch of issues when I enabled wifi 6 on the main router and ax nodes with lots of drop outs. I'm presuming lowest denominator wins hence wifi 6 doesn't work when there's several wifi 5 nodes in the network?

4) I've also had numerous iot device issues, I went down the path of a guest network, but that caused more issues with repeated drop outs, no connection pairing issues hence I've disabled it. I'm pretty tempted by the smart home master functionality of the asus wifi 7 stuff, and was contemplating a few different options, however, I'm concerned about wifi 7 wifi 6 equipment compatibility given the previous issues. Are these likely if I add a wifi 7 router and use that to run the network? None of my current devices have firmware that gives guest network pro or smart home master

5) No doubt a daft question, but if I rationalise all the network kit; get rid of the ac stuff and add on wifi 7 router to set up the iot network (that i gather is really just an iot vlan) then will that work across all the nodes or if I switch to access points then all of the ax nodes aswell?

I now realise that I probably should have gone for access points rather than ai mesh nodes in the first place, the only good thing about these issues is the learning journey! I also realise that I'd ultimately be better off dumping everything, installing cat 6a and building a unifi network from scratch, however, given we already have lots of asus gear I'd ideally use it, in part to avoid the ewaste.

Anyway, if you've made it this far I already owe you a coffee, thoughts on the key questions above would much appreciated, particularly about dual wan inputs being split between the dsl router and usb tether into a seperate node.

Cheers

 

[aex.perez]

On number 2, with Mesh WiFi settings on the router get pushed to the nodes, thats what it does and part of its charm. That said my Router and Nodes do use the same channels and other settings, 3 SSID's (two which are Guest Networks) and as a result I can roam freely between them, some of that charm. Setting them up as AP's would give you more control of that but I believe roaming between them would not be as seamless as it is now, but I haven't set mine as AP's for awhile now, so can't say for sure.

But mixing AC and AX routers/nodes is likely a big part of your issues with drop outs. When I had my AC5300's with my AX88u I had similar issues as you describe. As for tethering, that's a Router function. Think of the Nodes, or APs as an extension or as a way to extend the range of your LAN (Wired or Wifi), they do not act as Routers.

Under AiMesh, select a Node, Management, USB application here are your choices,and as you noted Tethering is not among them

Assuming you could tether, you'd have to find a way to route your internet bound traffic from the router to the node to use the tethered USB that's going to require some fancy work to get all the router functions to work correctly over to a node on a link failure and back when its operational. Thinking about it more, that doesn't sound very feasible

 

[degrub]

Dual WAN on ASUS equipment is known to be problematic.
AiMesh is more likely to work with the master and all nodes the same hardware and firmware version. Other combinations can work . My understanding is the least capable node device ( wifi version, # of radios, bands, etc) sets the limits for the AiMesh.

For the DSL question - is the cable dedicated from the demarcation box to the router location or is it the existing inbound cable to a punchdown matrix somewhere in the house ? If the latter and all the phone cables terminate there, then it is a matter of figuring out which 2 pair they used to provide the DSL signal and moving that punch down to another outlet on the ring. If it is a dedicated cable, then it is a matter of running a new cable and terminating it in the desired upstairs location.

4G/5G is always going to be choppy and intermittent and low bandwidth generally. Does any ISP offer microwave or dedicated UHF radio service back to a tower with line of sight to your roof ? That would be stable at least.