Struggling with Asus ZenWiFi BE30000 aka 3 node BQ16 Pro bundle

[dh4]

I just purchased the 3 pack yesterday. I'm having issues with Sonos and Blink cameras (with OOTB settings). I did set up a separate IoT network as part of the setup instructions asked for. I have tried connected the Blink to both networks (main + IoT), and neither worked. Blink support says it's network congestion and packet loss, but I'm having a hard time believing that given 90% of my devices are working. Any suggestions? I had Eero before with 0 issues but hated the lack of flexibility. I have 60 day return so maybe these will be going back....

 

[garysteel]

I just purchased the 3 pack yesterday. I'm having issues with Sonos and Blink cameras (with OOTB settings). I did set up a separate IoT network as part of the setup instructions asked for. I have tried connected the Blink to both networks (main + IoT), and neither worked. Blink support says it's network congestion and packet loss, but I'm having a hard time believing that given 90% of my devices are working. Any suggestions? I had Eero before with 0 issues but hated the lack of flexibility. I have 60 day return so maybe these will be going back....

I had to disable the wifi7 and then sonos work, I think wifi 7 requires a higher standard than wpa2 and sonos can respond to it...my 2 Sonos moves were dead until I disabled the wifi7 (I didn't create a separate IOT channel as I'd have had to rename all my IOT devices to find the new ssid.

 

[dh4]

Disabling wifi7 did fix the Sonos. Now I'm troubleshooting blink and ring. Ring cameras are not refreshing or seeing the network to join. I wonder long term how we can handle this problem if we want to use WiFi 7? Create a separate network? But ideally your phone is on the same network so you can manage the Sonos system.

 

[garysteel]

YEah was thinking about that...it would still be on the same network just accessing via a different ssid, Its a thought I've not put into practice ...and while i'm still trying to tweak settings for reliability with iphone and ipad (consistent internet connectivity) I thought it I had to end up with another SSID I'd donate my core SSID as the legacy and create a new on for teh modern kit...I hates change and this Wifi 7 is a damn nuasance lol.

 

[Ripshod]

@dh4 do you have WPA2 enabled on your WiFi? I know Ring did have a warning about wpa3 on their site recently.

 

[dh4]

The main network is WPA2/WPA3-Personal and the "IoT" network is WPA2-Personal. I was finally able to get the Ring to connect to the "IoT" network. Interestingly enough, it couldn't even see the main network. I saw my neighbors SSIDs, but not the main. The blink cameras will connect to wifi but I can't connect to any of the cameras from the blink connect module. It's a nightmare.

 

[jzchen]

I have a single BQ16 Pro. Ended up with 3 separate SSIDs, (no IoT network, gave up on that). They are all the same SSID and password: 2.5 and 5 GHz SmartConnected WPA2/WPA3, 6 GHz-1 WPA3 (WiFi 7 toggled OFF), and 6 GHz-2 WPA3 (WiFi 7 toggled ON). So far so good.

 

[workin247365]

The main network is WPA2/WPA3-Personal and the "IoT" network is WPA2-Personal. I was finally able to get the Ring to connect to the "IoT" network. Interestingly enough, it couldn't even see the main network. I saw my neighbors SSIDs, but not the main. The blink cameras will connect to wifi but I can't connect to any of the cameras from the blink connect module. It's a nightmare.

I had the same issue of not being able to see the SSID saw ALL of the neighbors' but not my own. This was the fix and the OP posted a screenshot of this setting:
FWIW, I was able to fix my IoT issue (same as OP had) by only changing one setting. "Modulation Scheme (WiFi 5)" set to "Up to MCS 7 (802.11n)". This setting is located at: {Left Bar} Advanced Settings > Wireless > {top tab} Professional. It is the 8th item from the bottom. Hope this helps someone else prevent the spontaneous acceleration of a brand new router into the nearest solid structure.

As soon as I made that change, all my devices could see my IoT SSID and they have been connected all week. Many of my items are older Kasa smart switches, plugs, and off-brand light bulbs.

 

[dh4]

I applied your setting early on, so it may have helped (I forgot I did, but it's still set)... this could be why it finally saw the "IoT" network... but still can't see the main. I just joined a blink cam 20 ft off the ground 2 mins ago, and still... couldn't see the main .

For anyone with Sonos, here's what worked for me:
1) Disable Wi-Fi 7 on the main network
2) Go to Sonos app, your system devices should appear
3) Re-enable Wi-Fi 7 (if you want / need it)
4) Notice that all Sonos devices get moved to the "IoT" network

@workin247365, interestingly enough I had zero issues with Kasa devices (I have 20+).... The troublesome ones are Blink (still looking into it), Ring stick up cams, and Sonos.

For those with Peloton devices, I also was able to get those easily connected to the "IoT" network, they wouldn't pair with main.

An observation... the "IoT" network isn't a "security" network, it appears to be some logical separation of the main, but all devices can communicate bi-directionally over both. If you want a true "IoT" VLAN, maybe you have to create a separate one or explore applying some settings on the one created on setup.... that's for another day.

 

[Solar Trekker]

Posted a new thread here: https://www.snbforums.com/threads/s...ifi-be30000-aka-3-node-bq16-pro-bundle.92144/

 

[dh4]

@workin247365, did you add your Kasa devices to the IoT network created during setup? I spoke too soon, now my Kasa devices are acting funny and only 1/2 of them turned on this evening. I may go move them all from the main to IoT. I already have the setting you suggested applied to 2.4ghz. Strange it doesn’t work with main…

 

[dh4]

FYI; for those with Kasa devices, this was a helpful how-to to move them to the IoT network: https://community.tp-link.com/us/smart-home/forum/topic/560376

 

[dh4]

Has anyone had packet loss with these devices? I work from home and have noticed extreme packet loss (intermittent… where sites won’t load for minutes). I’m very close to going back to eero.

EDIT: it may not be packet loss. I keep getting ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR on a multitude of sites. I went to administration >> policy >> withdraw and it fixed it. Although, I’d prefer to not have to do this. Does anyone have a similar xp?

 

[Solar Trekker]

Has anyone had packet loss with these devices? I work from home and have noticed extreme packet loss (intermittent… where sites won’t load for minutes). I’m very close to going back to eero.

EDIT: it may not be packet loss. I keep getting ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR on a multitude of sites. I went to administration >> policy >> withdraw and it fixed it. Although, I’d prefer to not have to do this. Does anyone have a similar xp?

I am having similar issues - random connection issues. It happened a few times today. I was working on a zoom and randomly lost internet on my laptop around 10:48. Turned off wifi and back on and net came back.

Happened again around 11, but Zoom kept working even though nothing else worked (browser, ping, etc) which is doubly odd.

 

[dh4]

My logs look similar to yours. I plugged back in my eero and everything started working flawlessly … (ugh). I am heading back to BestBuy now to replace it. Will see if that yields the same or different results.

 

[srkash]

I have recently purchased the ASUS BE30000 and I found out a few things through my trials with trouble shooting.

1. software update upon set up is the only way to get the latest software update.
2. a lot of the devices are not compatible with WIFI 7. You have segmented your network for LOT devices but wifi 7 must be turned off for the network. You can turn off wifi 7 for your networks and the ASUS mesh will still work great.
3. going to wifi => professional and turning off txBursting will speed up devices. You have to turn it off for each band. Also turning on airtime fairness for each band helps as well.

I have found these changes to work very well.

I have been trying to set up my firewalla as a router and ASUS to work as AP. Reasoning is I prefer the Firewalla security features vs. trendmicro. I have found that when I put ASUS in AP mode the firewalla will only sense maybe half my devices or even less. I am not sure what I am doing wrong. I checked if I have DHCP on but that does not seem to be the issue and now I am wondering if I should not have use AP node and rather selected AI Mesh node (or option three which is used for network extension).

Appreciate any advice.

 

[JDThird]

New here, but I'm testing these BE30000 units, and had just a total $hitshow on my first night, Friday, and then all day Saturday. I finally got a reply from support for my issues Tuesday and now half of my issues are at least resolved.

About 3 weeks ago I replaced a Wifi6 Asus gaming firewall with an Eero Max 7 that I absolutely LOVED. Single SSID and every one of my 140 or so smart home devices connected just fine, and my higher speed devices like my Surface Pro 11 with Wifi 7 was able to copy files to my Synology or my media center PC (both on 10GB network cards since my wired network is 10GB) at about 250MB/s.

Got this Asus system, and it forced the IOT network out of the gate, so I figured I would go with it. All my devices would show as devices in the web GUI or the app, even get IP's, but everything showed offline in every smart app I use. Spent 12 or 14 hours nuking everything, rebuilding, trying different ways, different settings, and only once did my devices finally actually connect to the internet and show online - and of course I wanted to reboot to see if this miracle working would survive the reboot, and it did not.

But my other devices like my iPad, iPhone, Surface Pro 4, Surface Pro 9, Surface Pro 11, media center PC, all these things worked fine to get to the network. The wireless ones I could use on either my main Wifi7 wireless network or on the IOT secondary wireless network, and get to the internet just fine, but the smart devices just would not. And whereas my Eero lets my Surface copy files to my Synology or Media center PC at 2.5 MB/s, the Asus here has me stuck at Wifi 6 speeds and maybe 110 to 120MB/s, just like the old Wifi 6 network did, despite my Surface showing a 6GHz connection and a link speed of 5764 Mbps.

What Asus had me do for MY situation was simple and worked immediately for all of my smart home devices.

First, in the web GUI I had to go to Wireless > MLO and turn off the MLO feature.
Then under Network, on the main network, they had me disable the 2.4GHz band.

Once I did that, every single one of my smart devices came online just fine. I've swapped back and forth between the Eero Max 7 and this Asus unit multiple times as I tested things and every time, when I shut down the Eero devices and power on the Asus, things work and all my devices are back online.

So if someone is having issue with their smart devices, this may be worth seeing if it helps in YOUR setup.

Now I'm just waiting on them to give me options for how to increase my file copy speed from my Surface Pro to the faster hardwired network objects. There is no way I'll hold onto this Asus setup as long as I can only copy file-s at 40% of the speed of the Eero unit...

So if anyone has any settings to help increase the file copy speeds on the Wifi 7 main network I'd love to hear them. That is now my only issue.

When I swap the Asus and Eero units, the main Asus and Eero units are both put in the exact same spot, and using the same cable then to uplink to my 10GB switch downstairs. So my Surface is the same distance from each, physically they're in the same spot, and they're using the same Cat-6 cable. And it's consistent over the last week now, every single time, so it's not just some random thing that is just making the Asus slower only when I'm testing. This is too repeatable and consistent every single time.

Oh, forgot to mention I'm not using wireless backhaul, both my satellites are hardwired.

Anyway, hope those suggestions may help someone else with the devices side of things.

John

 

[garysteel]

New here, but I'm testing these BE30000 units, and had just a total $hitshow on my first night, Friday, and then all day Saturday. I finally got a reply from support for my issues Tuesday and now half of my issues are at least resolved.

About 3 weeks ago I replaced a Wifi6 Asus gaming firewall with an Eero Max 7 that I absolutely LOVED. Single SSID and every one of my 140 or so smart home devices connected just fine, and my higher speed devices like my Surface Pro 11 with Wifi 7 was able to copy files to my Synology or my media center PC (both on 10GB network cards since my wired network is 10GB) at about 250MB/s.

Got this Asus system, and it forced the IOT network out of the gate, so I figured I would go with it. All my devices would show as devices in the web GUI or the app, even get IP's, but everything showed offline in every smart app I use. Spent 12 or 14 hours nuking everything, rebuilding, trying different ways, different settings, and only once did my devices finally actually connect to the internet and show online - and of course I wanted to reboot to see if this miracle working would survive the reboot, and it did not.

But my other devices like my iPad, iPhone, Surface Pro 4, Surface Pro 9, Surface Pro 11, media center PC, all these things worked fine to get to the network. The wireless ones I could use on either my main Wifi7 wireless network or on the IOT secondary wireless network, and get to the internet just fine, but the smart devices just would not. And whereas my Eero lets my Surface copy files to my Synology or Media center PC at 2.5 MB/s, the Asus here has me stuck at Wifi 6 speeds and maybe 110 to 120MB/s, just like the old Wifi 6 network did, despite my Surface showing a 6GHz connection and a link speed of 5764 Mbps.

What Asus had me do for MY situation was simple and worked immediately for all of my smart home devices.

First, in the web GUI I had to go to Wireless > MLO and turn off the MLO feature.
Then under Network, on the main network, they had me disable the 2.4GHz band.

Once I did that, every single one of my smart devices came online just fine. I've swapped back and forth between the Eero Max 7 and this Asus unit multiple times as I tested things and every time, when I shut down the Eero devices and power on the Asus, things work and all my devices are back online.

So if someone is having issue with their smart devices, this may be worth seeing if it helps in YOUR setup.

Now I'm just waiting on them to give me options for how to increase my file copy speed from my Surface Pro to the faster hardwired network objects. There is no way I'll hold onto this Asus setup as long as I can only copy file-s at 40% of the speed of the Eero unit...

So if anyone has any settings to help increase the file copy speeds on the Wifi 7 main network I'd love to hear them. That is now my only issue.

When I swap the Asus and Eero units, the main Asus and Eero units are both put in the exact same spot, and using the same cable then to uplink to my 10GB switch downstairs. So my Surface is the same distance from each, physically they're in the same spot, and they're using the same Cat-6 cable. And it's consistent over the last week now, every single time, so it's not just some random thing that is just making the Asus slower only when I'm testing. This is too repeatable and consistent every single time.

Oh, forgot to mention I'm not using wireless backhaul, both my satellites are hardwired.

Anyway, hope those suggestions may help someone else with the devices side of things.

John

Thanks for sharing, i’m in uk so have the non pro bq16 (all that we can get due to wireless regs) however similar connectivy issues.. i resolved by disabling MLO and wifi7.. i was running 1 ssid and sonos refused to connect being incompatible with wifi7 wpa3 i think… but i did not need to disable 2.4Ghz …. Can’t help with 250MB/s but interested in solution when that happens.. good luck

 

[skypx]

I have been using the BE30000 for a few weeks and it has been 100% stable. I left MLO disabled and turned off WiFi 7 since we only have iPhones. The only issue I’ve encountered is the led on the router turning red indicating no internet but the internet was working fine. After a reboot it was back to normal. This is with the latest firmware ending in 32.

I was very shortsighted when I did my initial tests. We were traveling at the time and only the main router was connected and not the nodes. So after settling into our new home, I signed up for the fastest internet available and setup the BQ16 Pro (all 3 devices this time). The initial setup went well and I was also able to setup both nodes in a wired backhaul mode. All wireless devices would connect without any issues except for iPhones and iPads. The iPhones and iPads would initially connect but would randomly disconnect for not apparent reason. When the iPhones and iPads would disconnect it would still indicate it was connected (wifi symbol) but we had no access to the WAN or LAN. This would happen at random. Sometimes half a day before getting disconnected, sometimes 5 days. I tried everything I could think of to prevent this from happening, but nothing worked.

Reset the router and nodes to default, setup the network manually (not from a saved file) NOPE

Reset network setting on the devices NOPE

Reset the entire iPhone and set it up manually from scratch NOPE

Turn off the 160 MHz channel bandwidth for the 5 GHz band NOPE

Only use the 5 GHz band and not the 6 GHZ band NOPE

I even turned everything off like AiProtection for example to try to pinpoint the issue NOPE

The only thing that worked was to setup the nodes as access points, and since then no disconnections. This setup has been working well for about 3 weeks, and I'm convinced it's a node configuration issue. Hopefully this issue will be addressed in future firmware update. I would also like to apologize for providing shortsighted information. Never in a million years did I think iPhones and iPads would randomly disconnect from a mesh system that is sold in the US, with a market share of over 60%.

 

[Solar Trekker]

I was very shortsighted when I did my initial tests. We were traveling at the time and only the main router was connected and not the nodes. So after settling into our new home, I signed up for the fastest internet available and setup the BQ16 Pro (all 3 devices this time). The initial setup went well and I was also able to setup both nodes in a wired backhaul mode. All wireless devices would connect without any issues except for iPhones and iPads. The iPhones and iPads would initially connect but would randomly disconnect for not apparent reason. When the iPhones and iPads would disconnect it would still indicate it was connected (wifi symbol) but we had no access to the WAN or LAN. This would happen at random. Sometimes half a day before getting disconnected, sometimes 5 days. I tried everything I could think of to prevent this from happening, but nothing worked.

Reset the router and nodes to default, setup the network manually (not from a saved file) NOPE

Reset network setting on the devices NOPE

Reset the entire iPhone and set it up manually from scratch NOPE

Turn off the 160 MHz channel bandwidth for the 5 GHz band NOPE

Only use the 5 GHz band and not the 6 GHZ band NOPE

I even turned everything off like AiProtection for example to try to pinpoint the issue NOPE

The only thing that worked was to setup the nodes as access points, and since then no disconnections. This setup has been working well for about 3 weeks, and I'm convinced it's a node configuration issue. Hopefully this issue will be addressed in future firmware update. I would also like to apologize for providing shortsighted information. Never in a million years did I think iPhones and iPads would randomly disconnect from a mesh system that is sold in the US, with a market share of over 60%.

That is fascinating. I haven't messed with the node configuration yet, but I'll give that a try.

I've even had issues where my wired Apple devices will suffer high packet loss or get a 169 IP address when waking from sleep. I've been gathering logs with wireshark, and can see the high packet loss events, but can't figure out root cause yet.