The IT Nerd

I promised a follow up to the odd decision by ASUS to release a new firmware for their ZenWiFi XT8 mesh router just before Christmas. My experience has been positive so far. I have had zero issues with it. I had a brief look at my logs as since I factory reset my XT8 nodes after upgrading to this firmware. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I also note that memory usage on both nodes was around 72% of the 512MB of RAM. Previous firmwares had the RAM usage about 10% higher. That implies that the mesh router is operating more efficiently.

But to make sure that I wasn’t simply missing out on anything, I’ve been following a pair of threads on Reddit along with a thread on SNBForums. And in those places, the results are more mixed. The most common issue that has been reported is that there have been issues with the nodes disconnecting. Once that happens, it may be a challenge to get them to reconnect. Or they may never reconnect at all. Meanwhile others report no issues.

Based on that, this is clearly a your mileage may vary situation. If you are on a ASUS firmware for the XT8 that is stable, you may be better off staying on that version until whatever stability issues that I am not seeing are sorted out. However, if you do decide to upgrade, you should note the version of firmware that you are currently running so that you can downgrade back to it if problems present themselves. Specifically, losing connection to one of the nodes.

ASUS really needs to get a firmware release out that stabilizes things for the vast majority of their users. And unfortunately, this specific firmware doesn’t seem to be it. Based on what I am reading in the Reddit threads that I linked to above, some people are getting fed up with being treated as “beta testers”. That in the long term will affect the probability that these users will buy another ASUS product in a negative way. Thus ASUS would be well advised to get on getting a firmware out that is stable for all.

This entry was posted on December 26, 2022 at 8:48 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Asus. 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.