[RT-AC87U] Wireless printing fails for no particular reason

[got_milk]

I've been wrangling for this one for a few days with little success.

I replaced an old RT-N66U with an RT-AC87U, which I'm very happy with the upgrade. It came with an odd side-effect, however: my HP wireless printer has decided to intermittently stop working. Here's the scenario:

HP Printer <---- 2.4GHz ----> RT-AC87U <---- 5GHz ----> MacBook Pro

The first time I tried to print from this setup it didn't work, displaying a connection error with the printer. I was able to reestablish connection with the printer by removing it from the MacBook Pro and reinstalling it - I was able to print and scan for a few hours afterwards. After that, however, the printer became unresponsive again. On certain occasions if I leave the job in the print queue, it will suddenly spring to life and print it minutes or even hours later, work fine for a period of time (normally a couple of hours), then resume being unresponsive.

If I remove the printer from the MacBook Pro and reinstall it, it will always work for a number of hours and then resume intermittent failures.

When the printer is "not connected", it does respond to pings normally from the affected MacBook Pro.

If I swap out the RT-AC87U for the old RT-N66U, the printer works reliably without issue again.

Does anyone have any ideas what is causing this and how I can fix it?

 

[RMerlin]

I would try to do a factory default reset of the printer, in case it still stored some low-level wireless information that were specific to the previous router.

 

[got_milk]

Tried that yesterday, as well as clearing the printing system on OS X. Same issue cropped up today.

 

[KGB7]

Printers also have firmware and driver updates.

 

[got_milk]

Did that as well - printer is running both the latest firmware and accompanying driver on OS X.

I did update to Merlin's new .50 beta 1 firmware and things have improved greatly - the printer does seem to respond much faster, especially when querying for ink levels (what took ~10 seconds before takes less than a second on Merlin's build) so fingers crossed that the connection holds up over time.

 

[KGB7]

Test your printer every 6 hours for the next 48 hours.