Hi,
So first and foremost I would like to thank RMerlin guy for mashing up the merlin version of firmware. For most of the part it works very much awesome. I use it at home on AC87 and at work on exactly same router AC87 because this firmware gives better VPN options than vanilla firmware.
But there is a caveat - for some reason Merlin firmware does not seem to play nicely with apple portables over 5GHz :/
Over some time I've managed to narrow down the problem to the fact that when there is an merlin firmware and iphone (4, 5, 6, 6 plus, 6 plus) or ipad (mini 2, mini 3) is connected to 5GHz txrx with pre 58 firmware connection will get stuck and while viewing stations connected ... all apple products get struck at a very specific link bitrate (from mobile to station) and there is absolutely no traffic on the link - no matter what you do on hand held, data will not get through.
You can bail out of this situation by
- simply pinging hand held from any other point in the networ (this is a weirdest part !!!)
- switching wifi on hand held on/off
- rebooting station
- getting out of range and comming back
- connecting to different station
This problem usually occurs when router was up for a day or more.
Now, with 58 firmware I've not seen this issue yet BUT there is a persistent problem with data transmission between hand held and station. In normal situation when you use WIFIcall your call will get reliably dropped after 1 to 5 minutes. Facetime (audio) gets dropped as well but not as reliably. Airplay music playback works pretty good, but you can not leave it running for hours because it does drop out periodically.
Now all of the above does _NOT_ exist while having a asus firmware on the router.
About the routers:
- both bought from different sources, I bought mine somewhere in europe, company one was north of UK
- both bought with few months of time separation
- both configured with minimum configuration to get best performance (no packet inspection and other stuff). Only my home router has download manager and samba enabled. Other than that, ipv6 is disabled ( does not make any difference).
So first and foremost I would like to thank RMerlin guy for mashing up the merlin version of firmware. For most of the part it works very much awesome. I use it at home on AC87 and at work on exactly same router AC87 because this firmware gives better VPN options than vanilla firmware.
But there is a caveat - for some reason Merlin firmware does not seem to play nicely with apple portables over 5GHz :/
Over some time I've managed to narrow down the problem to the fact that when there is an merlin firmware and iphone (4, 5, 6, 6 plus, 6 plus) or ipad (mini 2, mini 3) is connected to 5GHz txrx with pre 58 firmware connection will get stuck and while viewing stations connected ... all apple products get struck at a very specific link bitrate (from mobile to station) and there is absolutely no traffic on the link - no matter what you do on hand held, data will not get through.
You can bail out of this situation by
- simply pinging hand held from any other point in the networ (this is a weirdest part !!!)
- switching wifi on hand held on/off
- rebooting station
- getting out of range and comming back
- connecting to different station
This problem usually occurs when router was up for a day or more.
Now, with 58 firmware I've not seen this issue yet BUT there is a persistent problem with data transmission between hand held and station. In normal situation when you use WIFIcall your call will get reliably dropped after 1 to 5 minutes. Facetime (audio) gets dropped as well but not as reliably. Airplay music playback works pretty good, but you can not leave it running for hours because it does drop out periodically.
Now all of the above does _NOT_ exist while having a asus firmware on the router.
About the routers:
- both bought from different sources, I bought mine somewhere in europe, company one was north of UK
- both bought with few months of time separation
- both configured with minimum configuration to get best performance (no packet inspection and other stuff). Only my home router has download manager and samba enabled. Other than that, ipv6 is disabled ( does not make any difference).