EA-AC87 or RT-AC66 as media bridge

[Naifu]

Hi everyone

Recently I replaced my RT-AC66 router with a RT-AC3200. Although living in a small flat the wireless coverage is not very good. Smart Connects puts most devices on the 2.4 Ghz band, even if they feature both 2.4 and 5Ghz band.

Unfortunately the router is placed at one corner of the flat while the devices are basically diagonally opposite through at least two walls. This I cannot change due to where the inet provider box connects.

My ps4 only supports 802.11n I believe. I tried to setup my old RT-AC66 router (Merlin 378.55 firmware) as a media bridge and connecting the ps4 to it by cable. The media bridge displayed a link rate of around 340Mbps using 5Ghz. As far as I understand this is rather low right? I'm using firmware 3.0.0.4.378.7838 on the RT-AC3200.

Would I be able to achieve a better link rate using a EA-AC87 instead of the RT-AC66? With smart connect activated is there anything else I could do to improve the link rate?

Regards
N.

 

[kossiewossie]

I have a AC68U as a media bridge to a AC3200 and I get around "Link rate: 585 Mbps" I also have a AC87U that I tested same distance connected to AC3200, and I get a "Link rate: 975 Mbps" the AC87U is pretty much same as EA-AC87, so from my testing I think you would notice better performance than using the AC66.

just for reference I tested 2 x AC87U same distance as my previous testing and I get a "Link rate: 1300 Mbps" sometimes jumps higher, using latest official Asus firmware on each device

I personally turned off Smart connect since it always puts all my devices on the 2.4ghz band, so I use same SSID for all bands on the AC3200, and use a combination of Wireless MAC Filter to restrict device to only be able to connect to a certain band on the router and Roaming assistant to force devices to switch bands at a given distance.

 

[Naifu]

Did some testing today. Hooked up the RT-AC66 as a media bridge. Sometimes the link speed would be higher sometimes even showing slightly more than 1000 Mbps but mostly it just drops down to 351 Mbps. However the network test of the PS4 was interesting: it jumped around showing speeds between ~7/6 and ~37/~5-6. Sony is stating on the screen the test is not overly reliable. So I decided to test another way.

I put my laptop at the same position as the RT-AC66. The laptop has a N150 wireless adapter and is able to establish a connection of around ~140 Mbps over 2.4Ghz band which is actually quite nice. Love that RT-AC3200

Transferring a file from my NAS using that laptop I was able to get:

• 2.4Ghz N connection up to 12 MB/s
• wired to RT-AC66 as media bridge up to 27 MB/s
• wired to RT-AC3200 ~110 MB/s (which the NAS is wired to)

Would that relate to the link speed of ~351 Mbps of the media bridge? I mean 12 / ~130 x 350 would be around that value of 24 MB/s. Not sure if that would even make sense to do that calculation.

I didn't see any difference in link speed with and without Smart Connect activated.

Soooo I noticed that the RT-AC66 is not capable of the higher 5Ghz channels the RT-AC3200 uses on the 5Ghz-2. I guess the EA-AC87 does support it? That would be one reason to get a EA-AC87 as a media bridge as I would be able to separate the regular 5Ghz devices from the media bridge.

P.S.: A funny thing I noticed is that on top of the regular MAC address of the RT-AC66 I needed to add another one only visible in the wireless protocol of the RT-AC3200 in order to get the bridge working while mac filtering was activated.

Cheers
N.

 

[Trentors]

Well it is easy: EA-AC87 does not work with RT-AC87U when the latter is updated to the latest firmware (9177). It does however work with other 5GHz routers it seems.

 

[Naifu]

So I bought an EA-AC87 today and wow did that thing give me headaches. The indicated link rates both on the EA-AC87 itself as well as in the RT-AC3200 log are a lot less than what I hoped for. The signal stabilizes pretty fast at a link rate of 390 Mbps. Using a RT-AC66 as a media bridge show a link rate jumping around between 351 -526 Mbps.

Unfortunately the EA-AC87 does not support the higher channels available on the 5Ghz-2 of the RT-AC3200. That was something I had hoped for to separate the media bridge on a separate 5Ghz band.

Not being happy I started to change all kinds of settings, with and without smart connect, with and without mac filtering. I even did try RT-AC66 antennas (had a set of 4) but that made the link rate worse.

Only after about 1.5 hours I actually tried some real life scenarios. I connected my laptop and transferred the same file in different scenarios:

RT-AC66 at intented position @ 351 -526 Mbps resulted in a transfer rate of ~27MB/s
RT-AC66 right next to RT-AC3200 @1051-1300 Mbps resulted in a transfer rate of ~45MB/s
EA-AC87 at intended position @ 390 Mbps resulted in a transfer rate of ~37MB/s

So obviously I went FTW?!? A much higher transfer rate while having a mediocre link rate. That was about the time I decided the EA-AC87 looks better (it's positioned in the living room) and stays. Probably I just understand nil about wlan and the link rate is highly misleading.

My 150 Mbps inet connection maxes out at a download rate of ~17.5 MB/s. So screw it the link rates are anyway higher than what my internet connection is.

Cheers
N.

 

[Naifu]

Having updated both devices to the latest firmware available I'm not 100% satisfied but they are usable. The connection sometimes slows down to a crawl and I have to restart the EA-AC87.

A strange this is that the EA-AC87 cannot find the 5Ghz-2 of the RT-AC3200 when doing a scan. I guess the EA-AC87 doesn't see the higher 100+ channels used. However after connecting to the router on the 5Ghz-1 module and turning on smart connect the EA-AC87 is often lands on the 5Ghz-2 module. No clue how that works.

The link speed is about 50%-75% better on the 5Ghz-2 module so I would really love to be able to move the EA-AC87 to that module permanently.

Cheers
N.

 

[Naifu]

Another update just to share my experience:

I didn't do any reset after applying that new firmware. The firmeware build number only indicated to me only a low number of changes (not changelog available )

As the media bridge link speed was fluctuating a lot over the last couple of days, today I did a reset out of curiosity. Wish I had done that reset to default earlier. With that firmware the EA-AC87 is finally able to see SSID with a 100+ channel. Also it now supports hidden SSID - either through manual configuration or making the SSID invisible after configuration is finished.

So finally I was able to turn of smart connect on my RT-AC3200 router and move the EA-AC87 to the 5Ghz-2 module. This resulted in a lot better link speed permanently.