Hi, this is a followup post to this one where I was looking for a router for my Arcadyan gateway, I picked up the Asus GT-AC2900 (aka RT-AC86U) and set it up yesterday, it is currently working and at similar speeds, so now I'm looking for ways to configure it, hopefully this can help others looking for a router/router advice too, here are some notes I had from my setup/configuring I already tried:
-I do have the wifi in the Arcadyan turned off thanks to Nater Tater's easy script and tutorial for how to do so. This keeps the gateway less busy/hot. In case you’re wondering the TMHI app and web interface still work through your router’s network, so does the script, so you can look at data metrics and reboot from there still.
-disabling DHCP on it's own like I had seen in some threads had made the wifi signal stop working (not unavailable it just had no internet), speeds didn't really change either so that was a no-go, if anyone knows more about that please let me know since I likely did it wrong or misunderstood I’m not home networking savvy.
-This forum specifically recommends AP mode for a router at the cost of losing features. I think I lost more than just features, when I turned on the AP mode I could no longer access the website to configure my router, I thankfully had set up the phone app before doing that and i could configure through there, the wifi signal also still worked, I tried to set it back to router mode through the app and then nothing could connect to it not even wired (this could've been because I had disabled DHCP before going into AP mode but I doubt it because I believe AP mode is already supposed to disable DHCP isn't it? +wired was still working when I had DHCP disabled originally), I ended up just having to factory reset it and set up the network again.
-I read that having the router use its own DNS instead of T-Mobile's could help you access more sites/help speed but I personally havent run into any sites I can't visit and a DNS benchmark I ran said TMobile's own would be the fastest so would it even be worth it for me?
-I heard warnings about double NAT causing issues but I haven’t noticed any issues at least so far. Either way is that something easily disabled/recommended?
The reason I needed a router in the first place was to lower my ping as TMHI has a terrible Bufferbloat problem. There are routers specifically designed to eliminate bufferbloat but they were a little overpriced for their specs and I wanted to be safe so I read on this forum and others that Asus routers are known to be friendly with TMHI so I went with that, the Adaptive QoS feature built into the router to reduce ping while doing certain tasks does seem to work though not crazy well, got an average of 26ms playing Guilty Gear. I may have to test it more.
What I know I haven’t tried is the Asuswrt-Merlin custom firmware for the router, this comes with 2 features that could help being adjusting the MTU packet size and enabling Cake SQM. I wanted to check back here before trying Merlin in case I missed anything I could still try on the normal firmware.
-I read from lots of places that adjusting our MTU packet size in the router to what our gateway is actually delivering could help greatly with speed and ping, what size is different for everybody most places say 1420 or 1450 but through my test using Ping & Net I got 1480, it doesn't seem like I can adjust the packet size in the normal firmware but I could through Merlin.
-Cake (only available on the new HND Asus Routers like mine) is an SQM feature, SQM is a program made to specifically deal with bufferbloat and make ping better across every device, this would be more preferable than the Adaptive QoS for me since it isn’t task-dependent. If you've never had bufferbloat before it’s likely because many cable/fiber ISPs provide routers that already have some sort of SQM, but TMHI doesn’t.
So that’s everything I can think of, sorry for the wall, if anyone has any advice/pointers for what I should try before trying Merlin let me know, thanks for reading.
