New wireless setup

[John Fallon]

Good evening kind members.
If you don't mind, I would like to anask you for an advice on a new wireless setup.
Untill now I have been using N66U for years, recently upgraded to AC86U with mixed experiences. I have been patient with it, but regardless if it's on new or old versions of FW or CFW it's still unreliable and I am afraid it has to go.
I would expect: rock solid performance, decent wireless coverage and good CPU for my OpenVPN client. I've got no interest in wasting any more time by being Asus's experimental pet and I think with newest equipment they have just dropped the ball.
Synology, Linksys, Asus, Netgear?
What would you recommend from your own experience?
Many thanks in advance.

 

[L&LD]

You won't find anything better or greener on the other side of the fence. Probably worse, honestly. You don't want to continue to be Asus' experimental pet but I doubt that you want to be any other manufacturer's experiment either?

Instead, why not explain your issues here and the steps you have taken to allow others to help get your router to a good/known state?

Every single manufacturer has issues and gotchas with the less than scientific world of wireless routing. In my opinion, Asus has the least issues for the most potential benefit when paired with RMerlin firmware and the available scripts from many contributors from this very forum here.

 

[Sanna1967]

I have been patient with it, but regardless if it's on new or old versions of FW or CFW it's still unreliable and I am afraid it has to go.

Instead, why not explain your issues here and the steps you have taken to allow others to help get your router to a good/known state?

+1

 

[John Fallon]

Kind members. With all due respect I have given my AC86U last chance today and it failed even beyond my expectations.
Loaded official, latest FW. Done proper reset. Went through initial setup and few minutes later router died. I won't be touching it again, it deserves its faith.
In regards to my question.
Would you have any decent recommendations?

 

[Klueless]

Ah, most disappointing especially after a successful run with the ol' N66U.

I did similar. Loved the N66U so much when it came time for upgrades I stuck with Asus; upgraded two sites to the 86U and home to the Blue Cave. One of the 86Us was problematic, I almost threw in the towel (trouble with the 5GHz band) but then it stabilized (albeit I do reboot about once a month but I can live with that). The other 86U (and the Blue Cave) have run flawlessly.

Sounds like it's RMA time (return/replace under warantee) or time to move on (I get it).

Tell us a little more and someone is very likely to chime in with a few (non-Asus) ideas.

Like why did you upgrade from the N66U? Was single router range/capacity adequate? Was it a simply time to move from WiFi 4 (N) to WiFi 5 (AC)? Or because you upgraded your ISP service speeds? Were you looking for better VPN performance?

(It might still be useful to know what your issues were with the 86U? For example how did it run without VPN client running?)​

If range was a problem someone might chime in with a mesh solution. If VPN performance was the issue, well, I dunno what to suggest.

Best of Luck!

 

[Trip]

You won't find anything better or greener on the other side of the fence.

That depends entirely on whose fence we're thinking of jumping. Another like-for-like, consumer all-in-one? Yeah, probably more of the same. Discrete, business-grade components? That grass can look like a Scott's lawn commercial, if the OP is willing to mow and water it.

@John Fallon - Sounds like you're ready to move on from the consumer all-in-one model to segregated hardware pieces, each focused on doing a single job of routing, switching and wifi. Chosen properly, I can almost guarantee the sum of the parts will produce a more reliable, higher-performing, more configurable and upgradeable solution. You will need at least intermediate-level networking knowledge, and/or a willingness to learn, to be able to setup and configure. But once properly put in place, your network will run more like an appliance and less like a toy.

If you're willing to consider the above approach, I'm happy to get into suggestions for each piece. A couple questions as well: what is your home's internet speed, download and upload? Also, what, if anything, are you looking to run on the gateway besides OpenVPN?

 

[rnatalli]

To build on what Trip said, I would suggest Untangle for the router and Ruckus for WiFi if you’re ready to step up. These are more advanced, but more intuitive than say pfSense or Ubiquiti.


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[Klueless]

Sounds like you're ready to move on from the consumer all-in-one model to segregated hardware pieces, each focused on doing a single job of routing, switching and wifi. Chosen properly, I can almost guarantee the sum of the parts will produce a more reliable, higher-performing, more configurable and upgradeable solution. You will need at least intermediate-level networking knowledge, and/or a willingness to learn, to be able to setup and configure. But once properly put in place, your network will run more like an appliance and less like a toy.

I can't disagree with @Trip 's wisdom. That said I've three sites, requirements are modest, my skills are even more modest (and I'm lazy to boot) so I've made do with consumer grade products. Perhaps luck of the draw but everything has been awesome.

But, in support of Trip's comment, one site grew from one building to three. For buildings #2 & #3 I had a couple Ruckus (professional class) APs wired up (to my Asus 86U). Wow! (knock on wood : -) It's been a year and it's like Trip said, I've forgotten they're even there.

But, like I said, I'm lazy. My consumer grade routers are doing the job so I've no motivation to change ... at the moment.

EDIT:

I would suggest Untangle for the router and Ruckus for WiFi

Thanks for that tip. I had never heard of Untangle and may look at that sooner rather than later. Any idea how robust (fast) their VPN is? (PS - What is that Untangle at Home that runs on an RT-88U all about?)

 

[Poseidon]

Get a Netgear R7800 and call it a day. It’s vastly superior to the Asus 86U especially in wireless performance and stability.

The 86U is junk.

 

[Klueless]

Get a Netgear R7800

How is it with VPN?

 

[Trip]

The R7800 and identicalZyxel NBG6817 are the Qualcomm equivalents to the higher-end Broadcom all-in-ones (most Asus and some TP-Link). All specs held equal,the QCA stuff will typically provide 5 to 20% more real-world wifi throughput at range. Certain parts of the SoC code are also more stable and open-source accessible. On the flip side, Broadcom tends to be hardware-accelerated in areas where QCA's are not, encryption being a big one. That said, OpenWRT has pretty effective software flow offloading.

If doing another all-in-one, I'd probably through OpenWRT on a Zyxel NBG6817 for $169 and call it a day, but to each their own.

 

[Klueless]

On the flip side, Broadcom tends to be hardware-accelerated in areas where QCA's are not, encryption being a big one

Does that suggest that the Netgear R7800 would not do hardware encryption in support of peppy VPN performance?

 

[Trip]

Correct for the R7800, but most of these all-in-ones can only hardware-accelerate for NAT anyways, and even if they could for normal IPSEC vpn, they wouldn't be able to for OpenVPN, which is the flavor that most are running for VPN, so you're going to be CPU-bound regardless. In that case, you're dealing with arguably the most powerful, highest-clock ARM chip on both platforms - 1.7 or 1.8 Ghz dual or quad core CPUs, and it's core clock and underlying CPU architecture that matters with OpenVPN, MIPS and ARM being somewhat anemic, driving at most a few hundred Mb/s, and x86 really being required to push much more than that.

All of that said, the above (and other reasons) are why I've chosen to run WireGuard on my EdgeRouters, where I get basically line-rate gigabit without the CPU breaking much more than a 10% sweat... really phenomenal progress from Jason Donenfeld and crew. I know it's far from audit-proven across the board, so you won't find me deploying it in production for a client, but behind closed doors and in my labs, it blows the doors off OpenVPN all day long.

 

[L&LD]

@Trip (post 6 above), you're right of course. I was just basing my statements on the other consumer options @John Fallon listed in the first post.

Your input is always head and shoulders above what I can offer past the consumer/prosumer lineup.

 

[Trip]

No worries. Appreciate the compliment, too. I figured I'd just throw a bit of alternate perspective in to the mix, as it appears like he may be done with the all-in-one route. Not sure, though.

 

[John Fallon]

You're all very kind with all your comments on my humble query.
I love to learn and experiment with my networking needs, however at this moment I only need a simple remedy and substitute for somewhat buggy/faulty AC86U.
Thank you for suggesting Nightawk X4S and Armor Z2. Hence both are nearly identical, I've added only Netgear to my order along with WRT3200. Kids are back to school from tomorrow, so testing both through next couple of days should give me an idea which one would be a better solution to my problem.
I will report back with results next week.
Kind regards and again thank you so much for all your help.

 

[John Fallon]

That depends entirely on whose fence we're thinking of jumping. Another like-for-like, consumer all-in-one? Yeah, probably more of the same. Discrete, business-grade components? That grass can look like a Scott's lawn commercial, if the OP is willing to mow and water it.

@John Fallon - Sounds like you're ready to move on from the consumer all-in-one model to segregated hardware pieces, each focused on doing a single job of routing, switching and wifi. Chosen properly, I can almost guarantee the sum of the parts will produce a more reliable, higher-performing, more configurable and upgradeable solution. You will need at least intermediate-level networking knowledge, and/or a willingness to learn, to be able to setup and configure. But once properly put in place, your network will run more like an appliance and less like a toy.

If you're willing to consider the above approach, I'm happy to get into suggestions for each piece. A couple questions as well: what is your home's internet speed, download and upload? Also, what, if anything, are you looking to run on the gateway besides OpenVPN?

Had my eyes on some pfSence appliances (SG3100, SG1100 and a few no names) and some decent WLAN APs, but decided against it. For the future reference, would you be so kind and suggest a good and reliable combination of both for a beginner's home OVPN/WLAN needs? I would treat it with great appreciation as my summer project.
I am running VM through DocSis3 with 200D and 20U speeds. Apart from proper OVPN speeds and decent WLAN my expectations are minimal.

 

[Marin]

That depends entirely on whose fence we're thinking of jumping. Another like-for-like, consumer all-in-one? Yeah, probably more of the same. Discrete, business-grade components? That grass can look like a Scott's lawn commercial, if the OP is willing to mow and water it.

@John Fallon - Sounds like you're ready to move on from the consumer all-in-one model to segregated hardware pieces, each focused on doing a single job of routing, switching and wifi. Chosen properly, I can almost guarantee the sum of the parts will produce a more reliable, higher-performing, more configurable and upgradeable solution. You will need at least intermediate-level networking knowledge, and/or a willingness to learn, to be able to setup and configure. But once properly put in place, your network will run more like an appliance and less like a toy.

If you're willing to consider the above approach, I'm happy to get into suggestions for each piece. A couple questions as well: what is your home's internet speed, download and upload? Also, what, if anything, are you looking to run on the gateway besides OpenVPN?

@Trip,

Thank you for posting this. Would appreciate any info you would be willing to share about any such segregated hardware setups whenever you have time (for prosumers with gigabit speed networks or less-than-that like myself). I realize that there may be tons of options out there but are there any particular setups requiring certain devices/brands (routers, switches, AP routers, Edgerouter, Ubiquity, Microtic, Qotom, etc.) that you would recommend for beginners and as well as those with more advanced networking knowledge to begin experimenting with? In addition, I would be particularly interested in any setups involving the use of pfSense, Untangle, etc. I have been trying to learn more from YouTube videos (Lawrence Systems, etc). Feel free to also direct us to other posts or links that may be useful for this purpose.

Thank you so much!


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[John Fallon]

After first day of testing both units, I have to say just one thing.
Both going back to shop.
In fact they were both doomed regardless of great WLAN coverage, stability and good CPUs, as they lacking very needed HW Acceleration to deal with AES-256-GCM.
AC86U is the only budget option for now with that CPU for speedy OVPN.
Next on my agenda is AX series. Ordered 92U, will keep you updated.

 

[Klueless]

In fact they were both doomed regardless of great WLAN coverage, stability and good CPUs, as they lacking very needed HW Acceleration to deal with AES-256-GCM.

Thanks for the followup and sorry about your disappointment. Perhaps we can learn from you? What are your ISP speeds? What VPN speeds did you see with your most recent experiments? What were you seeing with the 86U? (when it worked : -)

I did hear you. The 86U is dead to you. And that is fine. Like you my N66Us were awesome so when it came to update I stuck with Asus. I have 86Us at two of my sites. One is rock solid. The other was "iffy". 5 GHz kept failing but it's been pretty good for the past year! My memory is failing but seems like one of the following helped; firmware update, complete reset of 5 GHz and the repair (later replacement) of a bad range extender that connected on the 5 GHz band.

Others report there was a bad "batch" of 86Us and that a RMA/return fixed their problems.

With some specificity what problems were you having?