Asus RT-AC88U Mesh Support

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

I have several RT-AC88U Wi-Fi routers that I am flashing over to OpenWrt. One is the gateway, another is a hardwired Wi-Fi access point, and the last I am hoping to setup as a wireless backhaul access point out in the garage. I have all three flashed with 24.10.0. They all work as hardwired access points but not as a 802.11s mesh network. I have installed wpad-mesh-mbedtls and setup a Mesh network in the wireless menu.

I have yet to get a 802.11s mesh network to appear on my phone or laptop, it doesn't even seem to broadcast. Running iw list I don't see mesh point listed as a support interface mode:

Supported interface modes:
* IBSS
* managed
* AP
* P2P-client
* P2P-GO
* P2P-device

Does the RT-AC88U not support wireless mesh in OpenWrt? Asus's firmware had a mesh option that was working so I assumed it would be supported in OpenWrt.

2

It's Broadcom/ brcmfmac, you only get what Broadcom grants you - and they've mostly pulled driver support completely.

3

So Asus has a licensed driver from Broadcom? That's a pain.
Any other CPUs people should watch out for? Or just Broadcom?

4

Mediatek/ Filogic 830/820 or Qualcomm-Atheros ipq807x generally work, details depending on the individual devices, the magic lies in investigating about this before buying.

5

Thanks for the info. I got these for a bargain so not the worse lesson to learn.
Latest firmware from Asus was released in March so I'll revert on the wireless backhaul until I find a better solution.

Thanks again

6

It's not just the WL drivers for Wireless - it's the entire BSP...

RMerlin builds have good support as a fork from AsusWRT GPL - along with good community support over on SmallNetBuilder.com - not sure where the support ended with AC88U and AIMesh, but I think they may still be current.

7

I know it has been established that this device does not support mesh mode, but I think it is worthwhile mentioning a common misconception:
Normal user devices (phones, laptops, tablets etc) cannot connect to a mesh backhaul directly, and most modern user devices will, correctly, not list the mesh id as an SSID (some older ones did/do - causing some confusion because they would fail to connect).

If you want a meshnode to be capable of having user devices connect to it, that meshnode must also have a virtual wireless interface in AP mode along with the virtual mesh interface - commonly referred to as a mesh-gate ie a gateway for user devices to be able to access resources through the mesh backhaul.