When we moved recently I went on Wirecutter to look at their recommendations for the best Wi-Fi mesh setup. Since my new internet was allegedly gigabit, I bought the ASUS ZenWiFi AX that they recommend.

It worked great! At first. After a few days, all of a sudden the single node I had wouldn’t use the dedicated 5Ghz backhaul channel: the light on the front of the unit was perpetually yellow. I moved some things around and rebooted everything: the light went white, but then a day or two later the uplink was back to 2.4Ghz mode, hosing the internet speed for anything connected to that node. I tried again to move the units around to make sure they weren’t too obstructed, but nothing would get the 5Ghz backhaul to work consistently.

I did a little googling, and long story short, I found this Reddit comment, which I’ll copy here for posterity.

I had the same issues with my XT8. Strong uplink when on 5G-2, but after a while the node would switch to 2.4G where the signal was weak.

I was able to keep the node on 5G-2 by disabling roaming.

On the web interface:
– go to Wireless > Professional
– select 5Ghz-2 for Band
– under roaming assistant select “disable”
– click “apply” and reboot the node

So I did that and… it worked! Seems like the 5Ghz backhaul connection is very stable now. Figured I would post that here since googling didn’t help until I scrolled all the way to the bottom of a reddit thread, hopefully if you’re having the same issue, this post can help!