I have also been running into the same problems as other users. Even with the newest firmware and selecting 40 MHz, It works intermittently. I returned my router. If this is how TP-link supports their flagship consumer router I can't imagine how horrible the other routers are. Never buying TP-link again.

this is a real company? cause this is the flagship router from them and the last firmware is from 7/29/2013. I WILL NEVER EVER EVER BUY ANYTHING FROM TPLINLK AGAIN. I wish i could turn back time and spend $100 more in a nighthawk !!!

I downgraded to beta 140127 because 140307 was unbearable (pages not loading on 2.4 and 5GHz), but now I still have the same issues where also 2.4GHz is not functional every 5~10 minutes. I also just had another drop to a transmit rate of 7Mbps, which I haven't seen since upgrading from the stable release to beta firmware, but apparently are still present.

I'm getting sick of this router.

Everyone having trouble with this router need a to submit a ticket and push for an RMA. Then you need to ask them to swap from V1 to V2. The V2 hardware has a better, more recent, non-broken radio chip that may solve all the problems. I have just today sent 3 back and expect to have the V2 units back by next weekend and will report back if they fixed the problem with broadcom chips connecting (which I believe broadcom chips are in the Mac book pros that aren't working).

For what it's worth, the support people I've dealt with have been great. No resistance at all. This makes me think they realize it's a known issue and have addressed it by releasing a V2 of the hardware.

I'll also add that inability for broadcom chips to connect is the ONLY problem I've had with these routers. I had all 3 set up in WDS with AC speeds streaming HD video all over the place. The routers worked great with each other, just not with broadcom based devices on the 5ghz band.

140307 is not stable for me ... connection remains connected by data transmission stops. The previous version of the firmware was much more stable.

New beta firmware, 140402:


https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9420498/ArcherC7v1_en_up_boot140402.rar

ERamseth wrote

Everyone having trouble with this router need a to submit a ticket and push for an RMA.

Support won't RMA for me - I still have a paperweight... :(

changelog?

I have installed 140402 on my router Archer C7 and running. Wireless access at 2.4 GHz is correct, access to the hard drive connected to the USB port also no problem. The print server also works correctly. I can't see any issues now.

The last couple days I have had a lot of problems with my connection, on both frequencies. My iPhone 5s was not loading anything most of the time, toggling Wifi didn't really help. Rebooting however did help.

I just installed 140402 and it nicely reset to factory defaults :( so it took me an hour to get everything working again (the connection with my ISP router was not working initially, turned out the ISP router had to be rebooted for everything to start working). However, my late 2013 rMBP was still dropping packages every minute or so, which I had to deal with a lot over the last week. No sign of improvements just yet.

Given the fact that I never reboot —the Mac's uptime is 40 days— and the experience I had with rebooting my iPhone, I figured it would probably also fix the issues here. Moreover, the issues with 2.4GHz only started to show with 140307, but I had already downgraded to 140127 and even then did I still have the same issues, another indication that the problem may be with the Mac drivers instead of the TP-Link firmware.

I didn't want to reboot though, but decided to simply disable the Broadcom drivers by unloading the AirPortBrcm4360 kernel extension (there are a couple 802.11 related, this was just a guess). It gave an error that it wasn't unloaded because of related instances, but my AirPort said 'No hardware installed' so it seemed to have worked. Reloading the extension brought back my Wifi. I haven't seen any issues since, which has been about an hour now. I'm currently trying if 5GHz issues are still present (Adium was always disconnecting from Facebook chat in less than 15 minutes) but so far, so good, the 15 minutes have long been passed without issues.

So, if you are on a Mac, try to reboot first, especially if you never do so. You may also unload the driver as I did but if you don't want to get into trouble, just reboot. Having reloaded only the driver however instead of a complete reboot has helped me in finding exactly what to blame, and I start to believe it's most definitely the Broadcom drivers of Mac OS.

What I do not know is whether or not 140402 fixes issues with 5GHz, or if earlier firmware —to my knowledge 140127 was not, I have been using that one for quite a while, but 140307 may have been, I do not know— was already doing better. I have to test for a longer period of time to find out whether or not all issues have been resolved.

Edit Reading back my own comments, it seems like I used 140307 for about two weeks, and 5GHz was faulty within half an hour after having updated.That however is about a month ago, so my uptime was only about a week and I don't think there were issues with 2.4GHz back then. Hence, 140402 definitely seems to be an improvement.

jimasek wrote

I have installed 140402 on my router Archer C7 and running. Wireless access at 2.4 GHz is correct, access to the hard drive connected to the USB port also no problem. The print server also works correctly. I can't see any issues now.

Installed 140402 (3.13.34 Build 140402 Rel.64721n) for close to 24 hours, no issue for me as well. It does reset config but I could restore from backup.