Hi, gang!
I just picked up a pair of these GT-AXE16000s to use in an AI Mesh network and thought I'd share my experience and thoughts so far.
Setup could have gone better. After I powered up the first router, I connected via WiFi and ran the setup wizard. It setup my network and then restarted. After the restart, I was able to access the router's login page, but it wouldn't allow me to actually log in. Pushing the login button did nothing and if I tried reloading the page, it would sometimes refresh and then sometimes just hang while reloading. I tried powering the router off and then on again, but it made no difference. Eventually, I reset the router to factory defaults and tried to set it up again, but with the same results. After another factory reset, I went into Advanced settings and set things up manually and that allowed me to log in again after the router rebooted to set up to the new settings. Phew!
Then, I couldn't get it to connect to the Internet. I was trying to connect the router directly to my AT&T ONT, but eventually read where that is not possible, so I put the BGW210 gateway back in the loop and the router connected to the Internet right away. Another PHEW! Next up was to update the firmware. The process appeared to go smoothly, but when finished, it reported that I had tried to log in too many times, though I hadn't tried at all, and I was required to wait 4 minutes before I could try again. After the wait time expired, I was able to log right in.
Then, I set up the second router and powered it up. I went into the AI Mesh settings in the web interface, searched for it and found it and added it to the router. This went smoothly and I was up and running. Since the router firmware had already been updated, I found that I had to manually update the firmware on the router. I don't know if in the future both will be updated together, but I was a little disappointed that I had to download the firmware and the upload it manually to update the node. Perhaps it works this way as you can use many different routers as nodes within the Asus ecosystem. At this point, it was late and I was growing tired so I went to bed.
This morning I got up and started speed testing things only to be disappointed by speeds of about 100 Mbps. That was definitely not what I was expecting. So I fired up WiFi Explorer on my MacBook Air and scanned the network. The 2.4 GHz band looked normal, but the 5 GHz band had only set up 20 MHz-wide channels in both the low channels and the high channels. Weird! I changed the settings to select only 160 MHz-wide channels and the system updated the settings and shut down the radios for about 10 seconds. When they came back up, they were still all at 20 MHz-wide channels. So, I powered everything off and restarted both routers. This time when they came back up the 5 GHz channels were set to 160 MHz wide. Anther issue resolved! Then I checked speeds again and was getting around 400 Mbps, which is more like I was expecting. This is about 100 Mbps better than my previous system, an Amplifi Alien, from the same location. So, pretty exciting!
Next up, I tried my new iPad Pro, my only actual WiFi 6E device and got around 700 Mbps on it. Wow! And it was connected on the 6 GHz band, so everything was now working as expected and hoped for.
I then started identifying all of the clients on the network and ran into another issue. My LAN Scanner shows about 89 devices on the network, but the GT-AXE16000 is only reporting about 70. I have no idea why it's not showing everything. I checked the DHCP log and the log pretty much matches what the router is reporting as connected, 70 or so leases. Since I recently rebooted the router, I would have expected that all devices on the LAN would pull a new lease, so I'm not sure why 20 some odd devices don't have an active lease. I'll check things again tomorrow to see if the situation has changed. So, other than this clients not showing up issue and a couple of web GUI bugs, all seems pretty good right now. I am anxious to see how stable the network will be compared to the Amplifi Alien, which has been by far my most stable and reliable performer to date. However, while its performance was good, it was not as good as my previous Orbi system, but the reliability and having it not lose connections to some IOT devices made the performance loss acceptable. Hopefully, the Asus GT-AXE16000 will prove to be just as reliable.
As an aside, I followed Apple's recommendation to name all of the router's bands the same so that the devices can roam as they see fit. This goes against Asus' recommendation in the web GUI to separate them altogether or, at a minimum, to separate the 2.4/5 GHz networks from the 6 GHz network. But, it seems to be working just fine this way so I'll stick with it.
A couple of last notes. When in a mesh setup, you don't really have any control of the node. It's all handled through the router. This includes the AURA RGB settings for the node. They stay on the default and changing the settings in the web interface or through the Asus Router app only changes the router's setting. You can, however, turn them on or off independently, so that's something at least. I confirmed this with Asus support. Finally, the Asus Router app won't let you delete a previous setup. A while back I had a Zen WiFI system and that still appears in the app, though it reports that it cannot connect, obviously. But, there is no way that I or the support tech could find to delete it. I'm going to delete the app, which should also delete all of its settings, and reinstall it to see if this will take care of the unwanted network setup. I was able to successfully add the new GT-AXE16000 network to the app, but to me, not being able to delete a previous and unused setup from the app is a pretty big oversight on Asus' part.
