Unstable ping over WiFi when repeater is trying to connect to invalid network while ethernet is connected

Technical Support for Routers
1

I've posted this question/concern in the unofficial GLiNET subreddit and was advised to post it as a bug, so here I am here :slight_smile:

I just had a weird problem that bothered me for a few days. I was playing some online games while connected to the Beryl AX through WiFi (tried both 2.4 and 5 ghz), which in turn, was connected through ethernet directly to the main router, and every few seconds the ping peaked to around 300-400 ms which made the game non-playable. I suspected it's a problem with the internet of where I was staying since the Beryl was connected through ethernet directly.

Few days have passed and I've moved to a new place and the same problem persisted. Long story short - after some debugging I realized that the Beryl's repeater was stuck trying to connect to the last working WiFi network I had used in one of my previous places, and so, I guess, every time it tried to initiate the connection (which failed obviously), the entire WiFi network of the Beryl became unstable.

Is this an expected behavior of the Beryl/GLiNET routers? Is there anything that can be done to prevent it from happening? Or should I always remember to turn off the repeater if I'm using a wire?

I believe the problem can be easily reproduced by the following steps:

  1. Connect the GLiNET router to WAN via Ethernet cable
  2. Enable the wifi repeater and set it such that it would try to connect to an invalid wifi network. Make sure it indeed tries to connect periodically and endlessly.
  3. Connect a laptop or a phone to the router via WiFi (the problem doesn't happen if connected to the LAN port).
  4. Run a simple ping command infinitely with a 1 second interval to some website (e.g. ping www.google.com). Observe that every < 1 minute, you either get a timeout or the ping jumps to several hundred MS for a few iterations.

This affects everything, from video calls which would start lagging periodically to online games.

Question is - is it a bug? Or a hardware limitation?

Thanks!

2

Try to operate it as an access point and not in repeater mode.

3

Hi,

I'm not sure how this solves my problem. I don't want my GLiNET router to be an access point for the main router, I want it to be its own isolated router. It's about the way the GLiNET interacts with the main router. In some places I stay it will be connected directly to the main router via a cable, and in some places it will be connected to it via WiFi (using the repeater). However, whenever I move from a place where it used to connect via WiFi to a place where I'm using ethernet, the repeater would still try to connect to its previous WiFi network , but without success obviously because that network no longer exists in the new place, and if I don't disable the repeater in this case, it will make the entire WiFi network of the GLiNET's clients unstable as I described above. I don't want to change the network mode of the GLiNET router. I mean the problem I'm describing is not about the network mode, it's about what I suspect to be a bug in the GLiNET router, or, alternatively, a limitation of its hardware. It's easily solvable by disabling the repeater or removing the previous WiFi network from the saved networks whenever I'm moving to a new place and connected via ethernet... I'm just not sure why I need to do that just to avoid this problem, or why there is a problem in the first place.

I hope I was able to clarify it a bit more, sorry if I wasn't clear.