The IT Nerd

I just got off the phone with representatives from Linksys who shared with me some news in relation to the WRT32X and WRT3200ACM issues that I’ve been writing about for the last month.

First, they shared with me the root cause analysis of the issues that these routers have had. One cause is this Google issue that I wrote about yesterday. But I want to add to what I wrote yesterday to say that the problems with things like Google Chromecasts and Google Home killing your WiFi also extends to Android phones. Why is this important? When I was trying to troubleshoot the WiFi issues with my WRT32X, I had a couple Android phones turned on and connected to WiFi. When they were turned off, I found that I had a much better WiFi experience than when I had them turned on. This was validated by the experiences of users who were on the Linksys Community. Now this confirmation, further validated by Google saying that they are issuing a fix for this behavior, explains what I was seeing.

However, Linksys isn’t waiting for Google to fix this. The beta firmware for the WRT32X and WRT3200ACM that I told you about this past weekend has a fix for this issue in it. Now I did mention that it was a beta, but I couldn’t find anything wrong with the WRT32X variant of this firmware. Thus I feel comfortable recommending that you install it. But if you don’t want to run beta firmware, which by the way is completely understandable, production firmware is either out or will be out soon. In the case of the WRT3200ACM, that firmware is live as of now. All you need do is turn on the auto update of your router and you’ll get it. One thing that I should note is that about 50% of WRT3200ACM routers that are in production have received this update already. The version for the WRT32X is coming very soon as it’s still in the QA process. But if you have a WRT32X, you may want to proactively turn on auto update to get this firmware when it appears as it should be out sometime over the next few days. When it does pop up, I’ll post an update on what my experiences with it are.

One other thing. To further ensure that nothing else that can be classified as “bad” happens. Such as the Google fix breaking something else, Linksys will be monitoring the situation and be doing additional validation on the Google fix to ensure all their users are happy. One thing that was stressed to me on the call with Linksys is they really want to do right by their users. That’s why you saw them handing out replacement product such as Velop whole home Wifi nodes to customers. WiFi is important to everyone everywhere and Linksys gets that.

In closing, I have an ask for anyone who has a WRT3200ACM or a WRT32X. When you get this firmware update, please leave a comment below with what it’s like as I think it’s important for people to share their feedback on this. Given the results that I saw with the beta, I suspect that users will be very happy once they get the production firmware on their routers. And I think that the world should know about that.

This entry was posted on January 17, 2018 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Linksys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.