My RT-AX86U has improved behavior after hardware factory reset.

[rlfromm]

My RT-AX86U has the latest Merlin 3004.388.8.4 installed. My device seemed to have subtle issues affecting performance but no specific cause I could absolutely identify. I had issues placing and receiving calls using Ooma and the internal speed test would only run around 500Mbps. General internet usage and streaming was OK, and my PC speed test ran about 1Gbps. I have 1Gps Xfinity service.

The Ooma phone call behavior is really what drove me to investigate, since prior to Ooma I was using Xfinity for phone without issue. I reviewed the internal speed test history, and the last good speed test was November 2023 which was on Merlin 3004.388.4.0. Digging in, I found the Ooma has lost packets in its call logs. However, every test I ran never had any lost packets and latency and jitter was excellent. I also tried disabling the Trend Micro stuff and it made no difference.

I really did not want to do it, but today I removed the USB drive and did a hardware factor reset of the router. According to the old Merlin post its supposed to clear everything including NVRAM and JFFS. However, after I got all the settings reentered, I went to the internal speed test page and all my old test results were still there. Does anyone know why?

The good news is the router is now performing better! The internal speed test is hitting about 1Gbps and so far, Ooma seems to behave better.

I still don't know what caused the issue. However, I am very happy that for once a factory reset of a device resulted in a real benefit.

 

[bbunge]

Hard Factory Reset does not always clear all the settings on the AX86U. This has been a known issue for a couple of years and only seems to be on the AX86U. Factory reset with initialize from the GUI seems to work every time. It may be worth your time to do the factory reset with initialize and manually reconfigure. Or, if you really do not need Merlin to flash the Asus firmware.

 

[Tech9]

but today I removed the USB drive

This is where your issues start. The need of another reset is coming if you plug it back in and start tinkering. The router doesn't need 3rd party firmware and USB drive to work properly.

 

[rlfromm]

This is where your issues start. The need of another reset is coming if you plug it back in and start tinkering. The router doesn't need 3rd party firmware and USB drive to work properly.

The USB was a 4GB thumb drive to store the performance statistics. I use the Merlin version since it allows the ability to save the statistics to the drive. Other than that nothing was tweaked from defaults.

 

[Tech9]

I hope it stores the number of resets statistics as well. What is the need to measure the performance so much? The eventual traffic used is a total waste of bandwidth.