Help! 2.4Ghz devices suddenly unresponsive

Haggisman

Haggisman

Haggisman

Soldato
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Birmingham
I noticed last night one of my HA automations wasn't turning some lights on, at first I thought it was the automation itself, but - after some fiddling, I realised that all of my WiZ bulbs were unresponsive. At first I thought it was just those bulbs (I only installed them a couple of days ago), but I've since found that all of our Echoes have also lost internet connection, along with my Eufy doorbell and floodlight camera - checking further, it seems that every device on my 2.4GHz network is essentially "dead".

I'm able to "view" some statuses, e.g. of bulbs etc., but it's intermittent, and I can't update anything.

I'm running a UCG-Ultra (with a VM hub 4 in modem mode) and U6 Pro access point with 3 SSIDs: main 5GHz, kids 5GHz and the 2.4GHz (mainly) for IoT stuff - both of these have been rebooted (along with all of the other devices).

The clients are showing mostly good connection status to the wifi (there are a few with poorer connection - e.g. outdoor lights, but they've never had an issue before), however the Unifi dashboard is showing 20% TX retries, which doesn't strike me as good!

Everything wired and on 5GHz is absolutely fine.

Short of resetting everything to default and setting it up again (which I'd rather avoid), any ideas of what to check?!
 
Sounds like auto channel optimisation might be enabled and it’s done its thing and now there’s a load of channel overlap.

BTW no need for separate wifi for yours and kids networks, just use wireless pre shared keys.
 
ChrisD. said:
Sounds like auto channel optimisation might be enabled and it’s done its thing and now there’s a load of channel overlap.
Click to expand...

I did wonder if it had changed the channel and kicked everything off - is there a way to view the channel history?

Edit: nvm, found the logs - last automatic channel change was in August, so not that :(

ChrisD. said:
BTW no need for separate wifi for yours and kids networks, just use wireless pre shared keys.
Click to expand...

It's more so I can apply rules to their devices easily to kick them off the network at bed time etc.
 
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I had recently experiened something somewhat similar.

Our neighbours were connecting their two access points (also routers, they're the Linksys AX4200 units or a generation prior as it's not WiFi6 capable only WiFi5) wirelessly (without using a hardline - like we do here), and thus ended up setting up their mesh network badly to communicate with each other (using one of the channels as a backhaul), and their auto config setups basically chose to broadcast on the same channels as the ones we have setup at home. And we're split by a central brick wall only. So you can guess the overlap which caused devices to basically sit there waiting forever for something to happen.

I've had to manually choose a different channel, bandwidth, removal of the upper 5Ghz bands, etc and reset the WiFi twice now as they keep trying to get a decent connection without using a hardline to connect the access points together and they end up using 3 different channels to get theirs to work (THREE) - EVERY TIME, and I can see on WiFiAnalyzer that a few more of our neighbours are starting to do the same thing, so this issue is only going to get worse over time.

I REALLY wish our neighbours were more tech savvy, since it means they'll know to config their networks to not blow over their neighbours network by using any channel available. But I suspect that's just naive wishful thinking.

Sadly I think it's going to be something others will experience more of, especially in more closely packed residential areas. :(
 
Interesting - this happened again yesterday, when I was moving some wiring around while redecorating, which caused the AP to lose connectivity for a while; although in this case it seems it was only my WiZ bulbs which were affected. Changing the channel on the AP back to 6 seemed to fix it instantly. Seems these bulbs really don't like to lose their Wi-Fi connection!
 
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