0

Instability/slowness with Asus laptops or Intel network cards & poor support experience

Have been going back-and-forth with support for more than 3 months and they've been pretty unhelpful.

 

I have a very simple setup - cable modem (100Mbit/s) connects to Eero Pro and there is 1 Beacon about 20ft away.

 

The network was running fine for 2yrs but something started causing instability to 2 devices on the network around end of 2019.

 

One device is a Asus Chromebook and the other an Asus Win10 laptop - both using Intel NICs.

 

The Chromebook in particular experiences significant instability when connected to the Eero - continuous pings to the default gateway shows a lot of jitter and if I start browsing, the ping will shoot up to 1000ms+. I also notice the (layer2) connection to the network disconnecting/reconnecting frequently (though this may be responsible for the jitter).

 

The Win10 laptop experiences problems mainly when waking from sleep - again connections would become unstable and I have sometimes been unable to connect to the SSID unless I either do a hard reboot or disable/re-enable the NIC. Another thing I notice is sometimes the laptop negotiates 802.11n - when I disconnect/reconnect (staying in same location), it goes back to 802.11ac.

 

Both of the above Asus laptops have no problem with other wifi networks - so the hardware is fine. I can connect to the free ISP hotspot and my neighbor's SSID with no problem. I have also, to test, connected a cheap router south of the Eero and both of the Asus devices have no instability issues as soon as they're connected.

 

Other devices on the network (including many iOS devices, an Android phone, Roku and other ones) have no problems.

 

Things I have tried:

* Forgetting / re-authenticating with the SSIDs

* Tested the guest network - even worse

* Upgraded and downgraded the Win10 laptop NICs (upgrading made it worse, downgrading back to factory got me back to somewhat stable but still intermittent problems)

* Soft reset of Eero

* Hard reset of Eero

 

After soft / hard resets of the Eero, Support has 'escalated to an engineer'. They told me that there's a lot of other networks around causing noise (though not able to explain why the cheap $40 router I have is performing fine when I don't need to move to the other end of the apartment). Haven't heard anything from them for about a month.

 

Given the strange things I was seeing with the Win10 laptop when upgrading/downgrading driver and it negotiating 'n' instead of 'ac' at times I strongly suspect a code issue that's causing some sort of layer2 problem... but Support refuses to even test a code downgrade with me to rule it out and told me that if it was a real problem they would have heard more problems.

 

I tried being helpful by providing quite a lot of detail and was hoping they would work with me. I even tried asked to speak to a manager but the Support guy just told me the manager is only responsible for his career development and not to deal with customers.

 

At this point, I'm ready to ditch it and buy an Netgear Orbi but this is a last ditch effort to see if anyone else is having a problem and see if I can get some attention.

1 reply

    • vinnyhu208
    • 3 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Gave up and installed the Orbi last night - problem went away.

Content aside

  • 3 yrs agoLast active
  • 1Replies
  • 147Views
  • 1 Following