Wireless woes

I’m really not trying to get out of posting Wednesday stuff. It’s just that fate seems to be conspiring against me. Last week, I was so sick I couldn’t get out of bed. This time around, the illness has moved to my wireless router.

It started a couple of weeks ago, when my trusty old RT-N16 started acting up. Wireless speeds became unbearably slow, and latency was horrible. (We’re talking a 200 ms ping to the next room.) So, after eliminating all other potential sources of trouble, I bought a new router: an RT-AC66, also by Asus.

That, apparently, was a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the AC66 is a great router. But there’s a big problem, and it turns out that it’s the same problem that the N16 had.

After some research, I think I’ve pinpointed the problem: the wireless chipset. Both routers use essentially the same one for the 2.4 GHz band. And both of them use essentially the same firmware, thus the same driver for that chipset. That driver, however, doesn’t exactly work.

On various forums, Asus support people have said that a fix is in the works. They’ve said this in posts dating back to 2013, in fact. Yet no fix has solved all the problems.

So I’ve got a few options. I could try alternate firmware (DD-WRT, for example). That’s a road fraught with peril, as you may know, and there’s no guarantee it would really help. So, I’m going with option 2: get a third router. This one is a TP-LINK Archer C7. It’s a different manufacturer and a different chipset. That, of course, will mean a different set of problems, but (hopefully) some that are fixable.

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