Hate to sound ungrateful, but I wish you guys would fix all the other numerous bugs in your other wireless products before putting out yet another beta product.
The AC68U came out almost a year ago and there are still a ton a bugs even in your latest firmware release just over a week ago.
Asus follows the market for SOHO routers. Chip manufacturers are releasing chips to step by step meet the full 802.11AC specification. Asus makes routers around those new chips. "We", consumers want to buy the router with the most stunning specification, from either manufacturer. Now we face AC2400 (the RT-AC87) or AC3200 (soon the RT-AC3200). If tommorow an AC5600 would be released (if possible), all other routers seems to be outdated (like the RT-AC66 nowadays seems to be a useless old product).
I don't really know, but for sure the "router firmware development department" of Asus does not need a 6 story office building, with a staff working in 2 shifts to avoid traffic jams in the corridors. It would not surprise me if it is not even a handfull of people, with support of volunteers like Merlin.
Also realise that Asus does not manufacture the chipsets, bugs will for sure exist at various levels: the chipset drivers, the chipset itself, the router firmware and the Linux set with its drivers and software. Solutions for bugfixes will lay in the same area, at different parties, not only Asus.
Perhaps I come from a different set of experiences. I work in the ISP industry with a wide variety of enterprise Cisco routers and switches. Sure, every software release is bound to have some variety of bugs, but there are usually work arounds and you can disable features that you don't need in order avoid some of those bugs.
You need to compare the former Cisco/Linksys branch with Asus, which was much worser then Asus.
Do I expect $200 routers to perform like a $50,000 router? Of course not. But being new to this forum, as Gary from Asus is, it's amusing all the restore to factory defaults and NVRAM flash voodoo that needs to be performed or is recommended after a simple configuration or firmware change/upgrade. I have a Cisco 7204VXR that's been up for *8* years.
The Cisco 7204VXR is a complete different kind of equipment then SOHO routers.
NVRAM is NVRAM. The memory is either good or bad. That a firmware upgrade or configuration change corrupts things to the point of needing to blow everything away and restoring isn't a hardware problem, it's more software bugs. The configuration file is just text, whether just CLI code or XML, etc, makes no difference. It shouldn't become corrupted or fail to work after a firmware upgrade.
Return to factory defaults is NOT a normal requirement after a configuration change of firmware upgrade. Certain firmware upgrades require factory defaults due to the changes in the configuration settings table.
Return to defaults also helps to clear the forgotten configuration changes people may have made.
Bugs are one thing, ie, really random occurrences or rare issues that prevent maximum performance. That's to be expected with new products and/or new features.
I bought my router for its dual WAN capabilities and it just doesn't work. Period. I haven't read a single post from someone stating that it does work. That's not a bug - it's a feature that the manufacturer has advertised that doesn't work.
Dual WAN issues are reported here and in other forums. Dual WAN offers a variety of options, some seems to work, some seems not. There are also reports for working dual WAN (in a certain setup), like I succesfully used the dual WAN feature with a 3G dongle.
These bugs may be the normal to some, but not to me. You can read post after post in this forum about how buggy Asus route products are. Perhaps this post will get Gary's attention and things will get turned around. I'm hardly the only poster who's said rather than deal with products that don't work they just take them back for a refund.
The number of posts of bugs is for sure a fraction of the routers that are installed and simply work for the user. There are loads of posts of problems with the RT-N66, while mine and many others works flawless in the setup I have.
