ASUS RT-N66U Dark Knight Wireless Problems

I recently purchased a ASUS RT-N66U Dark Knight Wireless to replace an under performing all in one router/modem/wireless hotspot provided by Bigpond Internet here in Australia.  The ASUS RT-N66U was configured in Access Point mode to simply provide wireless access coverage for a residential house using the latest firmware as of this writing 3.0.0.4.374.720 downloaded from the ASUS website.

After the setup of the new wireless hotspot was configured, we tested the unit and it performed amazing.  After the unit was in use for a period of time however we noticed the following problems occur:

• After 4 hours in production, latency pinging the wireless hotspot was fluxuating between 1ms to 400ms.  This was when standing only a couple of metres away from the wireless access point.  Performance of the unit was also sub standard providing less then 4mbps to LAN resources instead of the promised 450mbps as promised by ASUS.  Rebooting the wireless access point resolved the problem.
• Later on a few hours later we then noticed the wireless access point started failing to pass DHCP discovery packets on to a nearby DHCP server and as a result wireless clients started getting 169. APIPA addresses.  Again rebooting the wireless access point.

After reverting to the whirlpool forums I was advised to rollback the firmware to 3.0.0.4.276.  Rolling back the firmware to a previous build stabilised the unit.  It has been a rock solid reliable unit since rolling back the firmware.

To obtain the 3.0.0.4.276 stable build of firmware please visit the following ASUS website:

http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?slanguage=en&m=RT-N66U+(VER.B1)&os=8

I hope these experiences help others who may have similar stability issues with the ASUS RT-N66U Dark Knight Wireless unit.