TP-Link RE650 (mt7615e) - Experience + Questions

Heya.

Long time OpenWRT users (yikes, over a decade now on various devices) first time poster.

I recently upgraded our TP-Link RE350 to a RE650 as my son decided to rip an antenna out of the RE350.

Only a snapshot build is currently available, but it installed fine and has been working great.

Its only been a couple of weeks but this reboot cycle after getting everything configured I have about a week of uptime without resetting the device or wifi.


The only 'show stopper' issue (although fixed) is as follows:

Every 86400 seconds (exactly) my television (slightly older android based Sony, with 802.11AC support though) would disconnect and refuse to connect. I traced this down to the group rekeying every 86400 seconds.

After setting:

option wpa_group_rekey '0'
option wpa_pair_rekey '0'
option wpa_master_rekey '0'

In /etc/config/wireless, the issue disappeared. A week of uptime now, no issues at all!

Is there a cleaner fix then disabling the group rekeying?

Chipset is Mediatek MT7615E btw.


Another question. 19.07 is now available. But on the OpenWRT page the only build under the RE650 page is a snapshot... When do the stable builds show up on the OpenWRT pages? I installed the snapshot a few days before 19.07 was released so technically 19.07 should support the RE650?


Thanks!

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Probably a client issue. I personally wouldn't disable rekeying. Perhaps make a separate SSID with rekeying disabled dedicated to the TV?

19.07 was branched in July 2019 and hence the version number :slight_smile: From that point on, only bug fixes are accepted in order to stabilize the branch. Features are only added to the master branch. Adding a new device is usually considered a feature, and hence will not be backported to stable branches such as 19.07. So in order for a device to receive 19.07.0 now, it needed to be supported before July 2017 when 19.07 was branched.

I have an RE450 but was having exactly the same issue with my Sony TV. The other symptom I noticed is, when trying to ping from one WIFI client to another on the same access point it would not reply after a few hours (or days?) of the RE450 being up - as if it was in isolation mode. Others on here have reported this issue.
The fix that seems to have worked is to add this line to your config wifi-iface sections in /etc/config/wireless
option multicast_to_unicast '0'

There is another forum post on this, to do with the hardware defaulting to 1 if left unset after a few hours of use (which will make it a challenge to re-create the issue!)

Since then my Sony TV has been fine - so worth trying.

I too am thinking about upgrading to the RE650 for slightly faster WIFI speeds

may i ask how's the performance? i planned to use it as a repeater/extender (hopefully without relayd) with 5GHz

is it stable enough? and what about the speed when compared with tp link firmware?

thanks a lot

Sorry for the late reply. It's difficult to say what performance is like VS the TP link firmware, but I prefer you can customise power settings, and it supports fast roaming so for example my iPhone or laptop will very quickly flip between hot spots when walking around without dropping the call

To give you some idea, I get 500/200mbs consistently on the speedtest app without any reboots over 5ghz - so it's very stable.

hi

thanks for your reply, i have been waiting for a reply so long... :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

have you got a re650 finally? i am still worry that it could brick my repeater by installing openwrt since there is only a few posts regarding this re650

although the stock firmware's performance is quite good and stable (reported more than 500Mbs @5GHz), i am quite annoyed that it uses the unencrypted http protocol

lol

Yes, I got the re650 some time back and for me at least it upgraded nicely for me. There is some info about it here
https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=8c51ddeff0876b439ac35a3f492ab719085bfb9c

yeah i have read that post too
and that sentence "Unfortunately, I can't find an easy way to recover the RE without opening the device" scared me. which means all or nothing! either make it or "brick" it

also, which version have you installed?

You're right, there is always that chance.

Mine is running
OpenWrt SNAPSHOT r14777-c4ab1b7dd9

ok, thanks a lot