At 15-feet, it had a peak throughput of 929.7Mbps. Asus RT-AX86U: Performanceīased on a week of testing using Ixia’s ixChariot’s network simulation benchmark in my 100-year old 3,500-square-foot home, the Asus RT-AX86U was equal parts reliable router and gaming companion. By contrast, the Bitdefender software that Netgear includes in its Armor security offering costs $70 a year for security updates. The best part is that it includes lifetime updates to counter new threats. Called AIProtection Pro, there’s nothing to load onto your devices, because the software works in the router, behind the scenes. It’s a secure router with built-in code from Trend Micro that not only can stop intrusions but block malware from attacking your network. It can be quite a light show at night, but the router has a button for turning off the lights. There are activity indicators for each of the Ethernet ports and whether its WPS system has been engaged. Up front, the RT-AX86U has 10 white LEDs that show it’s turned on, connected to the Internet and is transmitting on the 2.4- and 5GHz bands. The RT-AX86U has switches for turning the router on or off as well as one on the side is for using the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) protocol to quickly add a device to the network. There’s also a pair of USB 3 ports for adding up to two external hard drives to the network. For speedsters, two of the network ports can be aggregated for top-speed output. That’s potentially a total of five downstream ports, one more than most provide, but three less than TP-Link’s Archer AX6000’s eight LAN ports. To that it adds four dedicated gigabit per second downstream Ethernet ports along with an extra LAN port if the Multi-Gig connection if it’s not being used. (First the Arc shows up in the Sonos app, then Subs and Surrounds within a minute or a few at most.) Occasionally, maybe once a month, I’ll have to reboot the Arc, too, to reconnect, but never the Sub or Surrounds.This isn’t perfect, but the hassle is minimal, and a far cry from the constant drops that I was experiencing for a while.Along the back are a 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) and a 2.5Gbps Multi-Gig WAN input port for working with the latest broadband modems. The connection to Arc is usually restored. The fix is generally easy: turn the Asus off, wait a few seconds, turn it back on. (I suggest using the latest version in the “Release” folder, not the Beta folder) Since I started this thread 3 months ago, my general experience has been that I lose connection to Sonos Arc system about once a week. The interface is almost a duplicate of Asus stock. It’s also free, which is great, though rmerlin does accept donations. If you’re not familiar with it, Merlin isn’t tweakware for tech geeks-the focus is on fixing bugs in the stock firmware, better overall stability and improving performance. I have not used stock Asus firmware in years-I always use the Asuswrt-Merlin firmware from rmerlin, and many Asus users swear by it. But that was the issue and it’s finally solved. I can’t explain why that would be a problem-I’ve always had the QoS set that way, and with gigabit service, an AX router, a modest load of wifi clients in my apartment and no gaming, there should be bandwidth aplenty. Sonos system has stayed connected ever since. On a whim, and not expecting it to help, I turned off the QoS feature, which I have set to prioritize bandwidth for media streaming over other tasks. Meanwhile, I went into the router settings once again, looking for anything that might be an issue-even though I had gone through them all with the tech rep, and these were all the same settings that had worked on the AC88U. (However: KUDOS to such extraordinary tech support!) He then escalated the issue to an appointment with the Senior Support Team. I did all the troubleshooting I could, then called into Sonos support and spent almost 2 hours with a tech rep trying every potential solution possible, but nothing worked. Meanwhile, all other wifi devices in my home worked just fine-the Sonos was the only problem child. I’d reboot and the Sonos system would connect for 10-30 minutes, then lose wifi connection again. But soon the dropped connections started. Then I recently upgraded to the RT-AX86U using same Smart Connect default settings and, initially, all seemed fine. I’ve used Asus Smart Connect with all settings at default. No problems with the S2 app and no problems when I upgraded to an iPhone 12, other than the loss of Trueplay support, which continues to be a problem. I’m posting this in hopes of saving someone else from the hours of frustration I’ve endured to resolve this issue.įrom the time I set-up my Arc + Sub + Surrounds system in July with an Asus RT-AC88U router (connected to Fios Gigabit internet) it has worked without issue.
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