Dave-XR500

If you are still having problems with your XR500 and iPhone RCS chats, you can always disable the QoS (and reboot router after making the change) inside the XR500 if that is something you are okay with (like I was mentioning in my previous post). Something tied to QoS is blocking the connection with iPhone RCS, which is rather suprising. I tried everything else (port forwarding to appropriate ports, etc.) and that was the only solution that worked for my home network. I have everything else still enabled in the router, except for QoS being disabled, and my wife's iPhone has worked perfectly with RCS chats (since disabling QoS on the XR500). I had to reboot router after disabling QoS then it works great.

I was also having issues with many devices connecting when doing the bridge setting on the 2.4g network. The more I was looking at it, looked like none of my devices were connecting on 2.4g anymore and all trying to use the 5g instead. So,,, that option didn't work for me either.. However, what Sean said was very helpful mentioning about doing a reboot and it was still working after removing bridge settings. That got me to thinking that he is probably right that one of the settings he changed before did the trick and the router just needed a reboot. With that in mind, I did some further troubleshooting and tried changing one setting at a time followed by rebooting the router. I recalled Netduma Fraser suggesting earlier to disable QoS at one point so tried that too which did the trick. It does appear to be the QoS causing the issue (which was suprising to me). After I checkmarked "Disable QoS" and rebooted the router, my wife's iPhone was happy again with RCS chats (and more importantly my wife was happy). I removed all Port Forwarding, and NAT is still set to secure, no DMZ set, with only real change from defaults being the QoS disabled which makes iPhone RCS work again. I didn't realize QoS would do any blocking like that. That is interesting. Maybe it has something to do with the iPhone trying to use port 443 and 5223 at the same time it is confusing the QoS. I took it a step further and re-enabled QoS and set a custom Firewall rule under Traffic Controller to Allow all traffic to my wifes iphone to go through (thinking that would work), but that did not work. I don't understand why totally disabling QoS works, but setting a Firewall rule for my wifes iphone to Allow all Traffic through does not. That's confusing to me, possible glitch? Anyways, I am happy for now with just leaving QoS disabled. Thanks for the help everyone!

Like you fine fellows I am having the same issue with my XR500 and iOS RCS functionality. This router has been my favorite router I've used, working great for years, up until this week. I also use a Samsung phone while my wife just bought one of the new iPhones. We learned her RCS chat wasn't working only when connected to our home network, but worked fine when connected to other networks. I am fairly tech savvy and figured there must be a port I need to open up on the router firewall, so tried opening up ports mentioned already in this thread, and also others I found when google searching which didn't help. Tried adding my wife's phone to DMZ temporarily thinking that would surely work, didn't. Then hooked up my old Linksys router to my modem just to make sure it wasn't a weird ISP issue which at point found my wifes iphone RCS worked flawlessly with the Linksys router, so that for sure narrowed it down to the XR500 blocking the RCS on my network for the iPhone. Anyways, after all that, I started google searching "XR500 RCS" which helped me find this thread with you all having the same problem. I tried Josh's suggestion which does technically work to my suprise. One thing I don't understand though, does this expose your network? The reason I ask, when you click on the question mark (for more info) inside the router GUI on that specific page at the very end it states "The related ports are bridged. Packets between bridged ports are not processed via NAT or firewall." Reading that line makes me feel like you are essentially forcing your wifi to bypass both NAT and Firewall when selecting it in the Group option. If that truly is the case, it doesn't feel like a secure solution. But I may also be interpretting that incorrectly. I am not sure that I fully understand what the "Bridge Group" setting is doing exactly when enabled on the wifi group. I am wondering if there is a different port that we can open up perhaps, or a different solution to make this work? I still don't honestly understand why it wouldn''t work when I put my wifes phone IP address as the DMZ, I figured that would work, or opening up the recommended ports,,, but doing Josh's recommendation above does work (I just don't understand if it's okay leaving it that way or if it's going to make your network less secure based on the verbiage??) Thanks for your time and help on this issue. David