Hello. I don’t mean to revive an old thread but I’m not sure where else to post this. I just wanted to say that this is still an issue with the AX86U router. I’ve been struggling to find the root cause of the problem and stumbled upon this thread.
Approx two weeks ago, I purchased an AX86U router as an upgrade to my ~2 year old AC86U. I didn’t really need AX since I only have one AX capable device at home and I personally think AX is way too overhyped at the moment anyway, but I liked the quad core CPU, 1GB of RAM, new radios, etc. Plus the router was on sale so I took the plunge.
Over the past two weeks of using and testing the router, I experience similar random and intermittent WiFi drops mentioned by others in this thread. I’m not sure how widespread this issue is but given that there are numerous reports of this happening, I’m inclined to believe that Asus might potentially have a consistency or quality control problem on their hands. It’s also possible that this issue is happening with ALL AX86U devices and the majority of users are just not noticing it.
The way I noticed the problem is that several times per week, my Microsoft Teams meetings would randomly freeze and I’d get “something went wrong” on the Teams window or I’d be booted out of the meeting completely. Then a few seconds later it would automatically reconnect. This was on an HP Elitebook 840 G7 laptop, which has a WiFi 6 chipset. I did make sure the firmware/driver of the laptop’s chipset was up-to-date. I’m also running the latest stock firmware of the router. Note - I tried Merlin’s firmware but the issue persisted. I’ve since gone back to stock. My ISP modem is bridged and connected to the AX86U’s regular WAN port (not 2.5G port) since I only subscribe to 150Mbps internet. I use separate SSIDs for 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Almost all of my wireless clients are connected to my 5GHz network. I use 2.4 just for a very small number of legacy clients that don’t have 5GHz support.
When the issue occurs, I can see that the laptop loses its connection to my WiFi network for a brief time and then re-connects. When that happens, I see “ampdu_resp_timeout” entries in the router’s system log. I do have AMPDU enabled along with using default values for RTS threshold, DTIM interval and Beacon Interval, and optimize ampdu is disabled. Enabling the optimization setting made no difference so I kept it disabled as recommended by many. I also tried with and without AX mode enabled but that too didn’t make a difference. I’ve been running the router with AX mode disabled and with the 160MHz channel disabled as well.
So, I don’t know if this is a problem with the router, with the Broadcom radios, or with the firmware.
I NEVER had this issue with my AC86U in the last two years I’ve been using it. That router has been absolutely rock solid for me. I would love to continue using the AX86U as my new router because I like how snappy it feels overall, but this random WiFi drop problem has me at my wits end, and I can’t afford to have these intermittent problems with my Teams meetings because it’s impacting my work. I’m in Teams meetings every day for vast periods of the day. I’d rather just continue using the AC router for its reliability. Sadly, I will probably return the AX router and perhaps wait for a hardware refresh of it or re-buy it in another year or two when AX clients become more prevalent…hopefully Asus will have fixed this problem by then.