Asus Wireless Extender (RP-AC55): Stock Firmware Work With Merlin Router...??

[salieri]

Hi All,

ASUS makes a wireless extender (Model: RP-AC55) that supports AiMesh. Understood that Merlin's firmware does NOT support this model.

Question: If I use this extender with its latest stock Asus firmware, will it work with my AC86U router running Merlin Firmware 384.19? I couldn't really find anything regarding this scenario.

Ideally, I'm looking for a cheap and small extender and was hoping this would be an option.

Feedback greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

[ColinTaylor]

As an extender/repeater it will work with any other wireless station whether that's an Asus device or not. Whether it will integrate with Merlin's firmware running in AiMesh mode giving you extra features I don't know.

 

[npoc]

Sorry to resurrect and old thread. I have an rp-ac55 and an rt-ac3100. In order to get stable aimesh I had to move my 3100 down to the 384 firmware from 386 because of unexplainable weirdness, that I can only attribute to the rp-ac55 not being able to fully communicate with the rt-ac3100. I haven't tried the merlin firmware yet, but has anyone found a firmware for the rp-ac55 that will work with the any 386 firmware?

 

[Wisiwyg]

Personally, I'm holding out for the RP-AX56 system. Not available in the US yet, and where it is available is priced almost as much as the RT-AX56U wireless router.

Re your RP-AC55, you've probably hit it, that AI Mesh won't fully integrate unless both the ap and router on on the same firmware level. Here's hoping that the RP-AC55 and all APs will get the 386.x firmware updates for AI Mesh 2.

As an alternative, you can probably run the RP as an extender or an ap, not mesh node, with the 396 firmware running on the router.

 

[grumbleranch]

I recently added a RP-AC55 running the stock firmware (3.0.0.4.384_83130) to my network with a RT-AC68U running Merlin 386.2_2. I was able to get AIMesh configured with both routers, but connecting to the network via the RP-AC55 does not appear to work reliably. For example, a node gets authenticated to the RP-AC55 but it does not receive an IP address via DHCP. Walking around with my phone will connect to the RP-AC55, but at that point I get intermittent access to the internet.

I'm supposing that mixing AIMesh versions like this does not work reliability. My plan is to downgrade the RT-AC68U to Merlin 384.19_0 and perform a hard reset so I can reconfigure everything and possibly get AIMesh working reliably.

 

[trajano]

@grumbleranch did your experiment work? I just reset one of my RPs because it was having some weirdness and I can't make it rejoin the AiMesh. I am on 386 as well on my AC68U router.