Asus BT10 - still not stable at all even after latest firmware - been tinkering for months - high frustration

[raven-au]

Aaahaa!
I have found the Smart Connect page from looking at the sceenshot you posted, buried in Network Tools!

 

[raven-au]

@raven-au Unfortunately I can't say I've had good experience with trying to create a IoT network. I found it difficult to impossible to get the couple of IoTs that I tried, to connect. I keep them connected to the main network. (As you can see from the screenshots I sent I have one for 2.4 and 5, 6-1, and last 6-2). Even though 6-1 is not WiFi 7 it also shows the 320 MHz on the list of available bandwidths...

I seem to have problems with the IoT SSID too.
I need to set 20MHz, and I set a fixed channel (since I'm pretty sure one of my devices gets confused if the channel changes and goes offline) and I set "Modulation Scheme (WiFi 5)" to "Up to MCS 7 (802.11n)" which seemed to work provided WiFi 7 (and of course MLO fronthaul) is not enabled on any network.
I enabled WiFi 7 on my main network yesterday afternoon and all seemed to go well until this morning when I see one of my smart power boards is offline. There's always at least one and nothing I do will fix it. Rebooting the router sometimes fixes it so I've taken to letting the router settle a little while then rebooting it after every change but even that didn't work with WiFi 7 enabled.

 

[raven-au]

Hay, @Tech9 can you comment about the foregoing discussion please.
It would be good if we could tie it back to @citizengris situation since I've hijacked the thread, sorry @citizengris.

 

[Tech9]

Not yet and @citizengris didn't provide feedback about eventual improvements based on your @raven-au and @jzchen conversation. I checked the Reddit thread and the person with no issues was the same one with "everything is working on it" here on SNB Forums who actually never had BT10 in AiMesh configuration, but a single unit only. The only person I know with this mesh set and 2x units is @Brookie55. For 4x units system... I'll never go with AiMesh and @citizengris may not like my suggestion.

The whole setup has serious drawbacks and relies on a lot of luck. This includes the no-name 10GbE switch between the main unit and the nodes. Going to the edge of tomorrow based on advertisements without any planning and using over the counter units with limited scaling capabilities and initial buggy firmware (5 firmware releases in 4 months with "fixed bugs") - not happening today.

 

[raven-au]

Ok ... for my part I'm seeing quite a bit of packet loss which, among other things, results in Smart Home devices appearing offline, being slow to respond or appearing to carry out an action but not actually do anything, and the like.

There's nothing I can do about that problem, as far as I'm aware, and it's very likely the same problem that others are seeing.
So my only choice is to stick'em back in their boxes and wait!

 

[Tech9]

My usual advice for new to the market products is try it out and if it doesn't work as advertised at the moment of purchase - send it back right away. Otherwise the return window closes and you end up with hope at some point the product will be fixed.

 

[raven-au]

My usual advice for new to the market products is try it out and if it doesn't work as advertised at the moment of purchase - send it back right away. Otherwise the return window closes and you end up with hope at some point the product will be fixed.

Sound advice for most,
But not for me, I buy routers because I like to play and the case here is no exception.
I don't want to return them, I want to keep them and see how things go later, and with ASUS it happens that later is often much later.

 

[jzchen]

@raven-au Are you using a UPS? If so try plugging the power brick directly to the wall outlet...

 

[raven-au]

@raven-au Are you using a UPS? If so try plugging the power brick directly to the wall outlet...

Interesting suggestion ...
Why do you say this?
I haven't seen any comments about power supply from UPS devices being problematic.
And in fact my main router in plugged into a 1.2kVA UPS, my AiMesh nodes (2) are plugged into power boards, are they problematic too?
Would plugging the router into a non-ups power point on the UPS be enough?

 

[jzchen]

Interesting suggestion ...
Why do you say this?
I haven't seen any comments about power supply from UPS devices being problematic.
And in fact my main router in plugged into a 1.2kVA UPS, my AiMesh nodes (2) are plugged into power boards, are they problematic too?
Would plugging the router into a non-ups power point on the UPS be enough?

I had started with my BQ16 Pro on a simple surge strip, then added a CyberPower UPS, (simulated sine wave version,) and had serious performance issues. I ended up buying a pure sine wave UPS and adding a Tripp Lite ISOBLOK2-0 to one of the outlets just in case. (Pardon the dust)...

Plugging into the non-backed up side did seem to help, as well as distancing from the UPS...

 

[raven-au]

I had started with my BQ16 Pro on a simple surge strip, then added a CyberPower UPS, (simulated sine wave version,) and had serious performance issues. I ended up buying a pure sine wave UPS and adding a Tripp Lite ISOBLOK2-0 to one of the outlets just in case. (Pardon the dust)...

Plugging into the non-backed up side did seem to help, as well as distancing from the UPS...

I'll try plugging directly into a wall outlet to check next time I put these back in, I've put in my BE85s already, thanks.

 

[Tech9]

I've put in my BE85s already

What is BE85s?

 

[raven-au]

What is BE85s?

Deco BE85, https://www.tp-link.com/au/home-networking/deco/deco-be85/.

 

[raven-au]

Deco BE85, https://www.tp-link.com/au/home-networking/deco/deco-be85/.

The annoying problem I have ATM is that Nintendo Switches stubbornly connect to the 2.4GHz band.
I can create a 5GHz only SSID with the ASUS router and the BE85 allows setting a preferred band for clients which also works.
Right now I'd prefer to use the ASUS routers but the problems I have found exclude that.

 

[raven-au]

@raven-au Unfortunately I can't say I've had good experience with trying to create a IoT network. I found it difficult to impossible to get the couple of IoTs that I tried, to connect. I keep them connected to the main network. (As you can see from the screenshots I sent I have one for 2.4 and 5, 6-1, and last 6-2). Even though 6-1 is not WiFi 7 it also shows the 320 MHz on the list of available bandwidths...

So maybe two out of the three work at a time and not all the bugs are solved...

Yeah, I don't define my network the same way (and don't have the ASUS in use now to get screen shots), but I also had problems with the IoT network so it might not matter.
When I set them up again and plug the power supply into a nearby wall outlet we will see if it's worth me posting screen shots and explanations of what I do.
The main difference I think is that I use a single main network entry for for all the wireless radios with WiFi 7 and MLO disabled and utility SSIDs for IoT, MLO, etc.
I was tempted to divide the main network into 2, a second for the 6GHz wireless and only have WPA3 enabled on that, similar thinking to what you described for guarding against WPA3 incompatibility.

 

[jzchen]

Interesting suggestion ...
Why do you say this?
I haven't seen any comments about power supply from UPS devices being problematic.
And in fact my main router in plugged into a 1.2kVA UPS, my AiMesh nodes (2) are plugged into power boards, are they problematic too?
Would plugging the router into a non-ups power point on the UPS be enough?

I did post it somewhere. I don't like cross posting on the three ASUS router related forums I am on sadly...

@Tech9 I believe that is TP-Link Deco BE85.

 

[raven-au]

Just a quick comment on how I got my wifi-7/MLO network stabilized. I now have only 5GHz. and 6GHz. bands on my main network, and 2.4GHz only on the IoT wifi-6 network. I do have WPA2/WPA3 for my main (wifi-7/MLO) network, but as usual I'm sure that 6GHz. is using only WPA3. The Network page shows wifi=7 and MLO for my main network, so as far as I can tell using WPA2/WPA3 doesn't affect MLO. All my devices, except security cameras the HDhomerun, electric blanket, smoke detector, internet radio, etc. are on the main network, and everything's finally peaceful and happy. When I had both a 2.4GHz. IoT network and 2.4GHz. also on the main wifi-7/MLO network, it just fell apart. That's why I've taken the 2.4GHz. band off the main network. While I'm not using AiMesh at this point, I do have a wifi-6 router in repeater mode (for the security cameras, doorbell, etc.) and another wifi-6 router in media bridge mode (for the HDhomerun), both connected to the IoT network. All routers and devices are running well.

Been up for about a week now, a new record for me and wifi-7 *smile*. Just thought I'd share this in case it helps anyone.

So for me what would be the difference.
While I have all the WiFi radios included in a main network SSID WiFi 7 and MLO are disabled and that doesn't help.
The only thing I can think of is maybe I had WPA2/WPA3 encryption enabled on that main network whereas I think your saying you separated the 2.4GHz interface out specifically to remove the WPA3 encryption and ensured it was not used with any other network SSIDs using 2.4GHz?
IIUC WPA3 is required by 6GHz (6E) and WiFi 7 so defining individual SSIDs for them shouldn't be a problem.

There is of course the question of packet loss I have seen, perhaps that's the power mentioned above.
But how does this happen?
I did the ping tests from a Windows machine connected to the router by ethernet so you immediately think either the computer or the devices being pinged are faulty.
Except that they aren't faulty, after replacing the routers ping tests from the same machine to every IoT device I tried worked fine and all the devices I expect to see eventually connected and have stayed connected and working.
Maybe it is the UPS/power supply interfering with ARP broadcast requests so that network packets can't be constructed and sent but that's about all I can come up with as a cause although that doesn't explain the fairly frequent long to very long ping times I saw.
It's a bit of a puzzle really ...

 

[Tech9]

Deco BE85

So this one works better with Wi-Fi 7, MLO, single SSID, WPA2/WPA3, etc? This is a Qualcomm hardware set and mesh features are built in what they call Networking Pro platform. What is working there is actually coming from Qualcomm. In Asus case AiMesh is additional software on top of whatever Broadcom provided in their black box closed source software. Perhaps the main source of issues and slow fixing over time. I remember XT8 users were looking for stable firmware for like 2 years after release.

 

[jzchen]

So this one works better with Wi-Fi 7, MLO, single SSID, WPA2/WPA3, etc? This is a Qualcomm hardware set and mesh features are built in what they call Networking Pro platform. What is working there is actually coming from Qualcomm. In Asus case AiMesh is additional software on top of whatever Broadcom provided in their black box closed source software. Perhaps the main source of issues and slow fixing over time. I remember XT8 users were looking for stable firmware for like 2 years after release.

My main router getting IP Passthrough from AT&T BGW320-500 is the Deco BE95. I chose it for the simple reason that all four channels sum to 33000 Mbps and it is recommended that the highest spec is to be centralized in the house/service. I do not connect a USB HDD/Flash as it has a setting to derate speed to decrease WiFi noise, plus it is lacking on USB server features.

The GT-BE98 Pro is in AP mode with AiMesh, and I have a BQ16 Pro as node. Latest BQ16 Pro firmware shows that devices now connect to it. Last node that seems dead is a RT-AX86U, no WiFi clients show connected to it...

MLO now works with my OnePlus Open phone on the BE95, I have it turned off on the ASUS network...

 

[Tech9]

I chose it for the simple reason that all four channels sum to 33000 Mbps

Yes, sure. Good luck with the 33000Mbps. You guys rely on marketing too much. Time to wake up, really.