The Asus ZenWiFi AX XT8 is a POS, right?

[srkbear]

I agree, calling XT8 a POS is way over the top. While I had a rough patch setting them up a year ago (including a dozen times that the router stopped responding after a simple config change like an IP address reservation, and required a hard reset), they have been working really well since - with the exception of ESP-based IoT devices, that I eventually just moved to an AP on an old router.

On the other hand, I don't think expecting these high-end units to handle 20+ or 40+ clients is unrealistic (and from my experience they do handle them well), and Asus has been repeatedly pushing out half-baked firmware. Also, while it is expected that unsatisfied customers would be more vocal, this should be the case for other routers as well. Same goes for the tweakers. As other routers do not seem to attract rants at this magnitude, there may indeed be more serious stability issues here.

That’s fair.

 

[virtualh]

I am glad I landed on this discussion. I just got a pair couple of weeks ago and I noticed that my nodes are rebooting randomly every other day or so. Contacted support and they said it could be the hardware issue and asked me to return the unit for a replacement.
I am not sure if it was due to hardware because I swapped both the units for primary router. May be Asus is taking an easy route. They told me current firmware has no such issues reported.

So need your advice. Should I return this unit for a replacement and hopefully that solves the issue. If it's truly the firmware issue, should I wait? Should I rollback to a previous version of the firmware?

I don't like the idea of rolling back firmware since that exposes the router to known vulnerabilities. I am a big fan of Asus and I only had to switch to TP-link last year since I couldn't get hold of an Asus router but I am back to Asus now.

 

[in2ndo]

I am glad I landed on this discussion. I just got a pair couple of weeks ago and I noticed that my nodes are rebooting randomly every other day or so. Contacted support and they said it could be the hardware issue and asked me to return the unit for a replacement.
I am not sure if it was due to hardware because I swapped both the units for primary router. May be Asus is taking an easy route. They told me current firmware has no such issues reported.

So need your advice. Should I return this unit for a replacement and hopefully that solves the issue. If it's truly the firmware issue, should I wait? Should I rollback to a previous version of the firmware?

I don't like the idea of rolling back firmware since that exposes the router to known vulnerabilities. I am a big fan of Asus and I only had to switch to TP-link last year since I couldn't get hold of an Asus router but I am back to Asus now.

I would return them. I also bought the couple and haven’t had one issue with them. Updated to the latest firmware as soon as it came out with the auto feature in the webpage and all went fine. I’m running mostly defaults with a couple of parental rules in there and over 20 devices. From tv’s, alarm system, thermostat, laptops, tablets, iPhones, appliances, dash cam when the car is outside near by. and garage door opener.

 

[jpthsd]

I am glad I landed on this discussion. I just got a pair couple of weeks ago and I noticed that my nodes are rebooting randomly every other day or so. Contacted support and they said it could be the hardware issue and asked me to return the unit for a replacement.
I am not sure if it was due to hardware because I swapped both the units for primary router. May be Asus is taking an easy route. They told me current firmware has no such issues reported.

So need your advice. Should I return this unit for a replacement and hopefully that solves the issue. If it's truly the firmware issue, should I wait? Should I rollback to a previous version of the firmware?

I don't like the idea of rolling back firmware since that exposes the router to known vulnerabilities. I am a big fan of Asus and I only had to switch to TP-link last year since I couldn't get hold of an Asus router but I am back to Asus now.

Return it , get the Zenwifi ET8 !!

 

[virtualh]

And ET8 don’t have this issue?

 

[in2ndo]

Return it , get the Zenwifi ET8 !!

I don’t think the ET8 is worth the money. At least not yet. Maybe in 3 to 5 years. When there are more devices that can take advantage of the technology.

 

[Ari_el]

Landed here troubleshooting my XT8s (+AX88u) after noticing degraded download speed on various devices - desktop, laptop, phones (150Mbps, down from the usual 700mbps) I noticed all devices where connecting at 200Mbps or less where before I used to see anywhere from 1300mbps to 800Mbps. Clearly the channel be became 40Mhz, my setting always is 20-160Mhz

After trying to tweak some 5Ghz wifi parameters and check my wired backhaul, reboot everything etc to no avail, after reading a few threads here I recalled I updated both XT8s to the newest fw a few weeks ago, I was running 45898.

Big mistake. After rolling back to 43181, all is back to normal.

 

[tangentialarc]

The XT8 is seriously unstable. It has issues with performance degradation if left online for too long so I set up a scheduled reboot, which seemed to work fine. Guess what happened next? It decided to reset itself to factory settings after one of these reboots and start broadcasting the default open network. Terrible firmware design.

I hope to get rid of this JUNK as soon as possible!

 

[tgl]

The XT8 is seriously unstable.

Some of the firmware releases for it are stable, some are not. The real problem is that which one(s) are stable seems to vary from one use-case to another. Mine have been pretty solid on 42095, but not any later release. Other people report different experiences; see the per-release threads in the sister forum ASUSWRT - Official. It's also possible that you have a unit that's got actual hardware problems; but my impression is that most people's problems are software, because some releases work okay for them.

Having said that, it's pretty unclear why ASUS should expect people to pay top dollar for a product with such abysmally incompetent software engineering. I'm very unlikely to buy another router from them.

 

[Smokey613]

When I was testing a pair of XT8 I too discovered that the 42095 firmware was the only version that worked.

 

[tangentialarc]

When I was testing a pair of XT8 I too discovered that the 42095 firmware was the only version that worked.

It's great that you have found something that works for you, but I would rather not regress to a firmware version with known vulnerabilities exposed in the changelog.

 

[ai-apple]

I got 22068 f/w oil the main and 21617 f/w on the node. It's rock solid without any issue all my devices connecting to it.

 

[j4y-t]

21617 has been stable for me after a number of tweaks. Not brave enough to try 22068 yet...

 

[johny_2000]

Same for my V1 XT8 pair, the only stable firmware is 42095.
Later versions work but intermittent wireless backhaul drops cause Plex to crash on devices.
And this is an important role for this mesh network, so I had to give up the latest security updates and sit on 42095 before replacing these routers with new ones.

 

[kildare]

I'd only wish that Gnuton had released a 42095-based version of his firmware, because his XT8 firmwares suffer of the same problems as the subsequent Asus official releases, at least in my case.
So I can't use Gnutons's...

 

[palmaholic]

Oh no! I'm currently doing my research on mesh routers. It seems none is good, not to say perfect. Every model has its own problem(s) or deal breaker to me. Originally, I'm targeting XT9, and hope that one day they may get the blessing from Merlin.

Any advice on where/which I should look up to? Thanks in advance.

 

[KingBravery]

I think the only solution to not have any issues by changing main router to another asus router like for example GT-AX11000.

 

[jackma]

For those happy with 386.42095: have you tried 386.49873?

I have just downgraded from 388.22068 to 386.49873 (recommended over 386.42095 due to the security patches) and It seems so much more stable than any 388 I have used.

Over the last 6 months, my mesh (4 XT8s) has been very unstable but until a few days ago I had no idea the fault was with the XT8 firmware...

I wonder if 386.42095 is even better than 386.49873.

 

[tgl]

For those happy with 386.42095: have you tried 386.49873?

I have. I had been running 42095 on a main XT8 (in access point mode) and two satellites running as media bridges, and it was pretty solid. Last August I thought I'd try updating to 49873, so I updated one satellite to that, and after it seemed stable for a day I updated the second one, and then a couple hours later the main ... and at that point things went to heck. The first-updated satellite no longer passed data reliably to the wired clients attached to it, though oddly the second one was fine. After a lot of frantic factory-resetting and firmware-reloading and dead-chicken-waving, where I ended up is that the main is back on 42095. That's been stable for me even though both satellites are still on 49873. Make of that what you will; this isn't a very typical configuration, so it's quite likely that YMMV.

 

[jackma]

Interesting.

On my side, I can confirm that 49873 is working amazingly well. It is quite impressive the difference between now and my experience over the last months. Not sure how I got used to the continuous issues, but I guess I hadn't time to investigate.

With 49873 all my devices are always connected to the closest node, 5G works well and I the backhaul is rock solid.

Not sure what Asus did with the last firmwares, but there is some clear issue there.