I’ve had my Opal as a travel router for around 2 years now and I’ve noticed some odd behaviours lately. I use it mostly at hotels, where I connect it to the hotel wifi and then broadcast to my devices (pretty standard I think).
I’ve updated to the latest v.4 firmware and since then I’m having this weird thing happen:
at first everything works great, but then after a either a few hours, and/or when I walk out of range and back in - those two things happened simultaneously - the 5GHz SSID broadcasted by Opal just disappears!
The 2.4 is unaffected, and when I look into the admin management it says everything is broadcasting as normal, yet my devices do NOT see the 5GHz at all! I tried scanning with Wifiman as well and the SSID is 100% not being broadcast. Restarting the device doesn’t help, but rebooting the router seems to help for a little bit until the same thing happens again.
I also noticed that if I forced the Repeater to hook to a 5GHz signal for internet, internet connection became very flaky.
So I’m guessing there may be something wrong with the 5GHz antenna maybe? Is there a setting or something I missed that would explain this at all?
I’m still testing on and off but I kind of need to get it working so for now I’m on 2.4, but the speeds are sort of junk…
Little bit of an update: this actually happens also in 2.4GHz, and I've figured out what triggers it. Whenever the router connects to either frequency of the hotel's wifi, it stops broadcasting that same frequency for its own network. Or rather, something happens that makes that frequency/SSID not work, because according to the status, it is still working fine, but devices can't see it.
This definitely did not happen before on FW v.3. The work around is to connect only to the other frequency but that inevitably creates a performance hit... any idea would be appreciated!
Can you confirm which firmware versions you have tried?
Are these hotels in the same country as you or different countries?
Have you set the correct country code in LuCI for your country?
Thanks for the answer.
Version is 4.3.319, and I'm at the same hotel actually having this issue. My country codes are correct also.
A bit more info which I think may be related, but with this issue I also have issues staying connected to the internet. After a random number of hours, the router just drops the repeater wifi. No reason (ie it's not because I get kicked out of the captive portal). I have to log back into the admin page, and go to switch network, only to reconnect to the same network again, and get the same IP and all. No apparent reason why it drops the signal, it just does.
I tried resetting to factory a few times to no avail. Very frustrating.