At my Wits End...Wifi Keeps Crashing, Can't Recover

pazbich33

For reference, I live in central PA, have gigabit internet and am currently using the G3100 router.

So for the past 2-3 months, I've had issues with my wifi where I wake up in the morning and wifi would be down. Rebooting (unplugging, etc) does not solve the issue. Only wired connections would remain working.

This has happened close to a dozen times now, and am on my 3rd router. Most recently I installed a new router last night and woke up this morning with no wifi. What solves it is usually doing a hard reset of the router. Only settings I change is the SSID names.

I do have about 45 total devices connected via wifi (most of which are Blink Cams, Echo devices and some smart bulbs). I have recently enabled the IOT network to see if that would help and it obviously hasn't. SON is also on.

Any ideas why this is happening? Too many devices? I'm thinking about ditching the Fios router and go with a Mesh system to see if that works.

smith6612

Blink's website suggests their hardware operates on the 2.4Ghz band only. Also, from my experience, many smart light bulbs are based on the ESP32 or ESP8266 and run on 2.4Ghz only. Amazon Echo devices will run on 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz.

If you have that many devices joining a 2.4Ghz network, it honestly does sound like your 2.4Ghz band is getting overloaded by something. Either by a lot of recording traffic, by broadcast/discovery traffic, or something related. Could be a bug with the router firmware as well.

To start, some changes I would suggest are the following:

• Disable automatic channel selection in the router
• Choose Channel 1, 6, or 11 for your 2.4Ghz radio to use
• Disable DFS 5Ghz channels. Amazon Echo devices support DFS channels, but many smart devices and consumer products (Smart TVs, less expensive laptops, etc) don't support DFS channels.
• Set your 5Ghz to a channel between 149 to 161
• If you have a second 5Ghz radio channel selection box, set that one to any channel between 36 to 161. It is okay to select a DFS channel for the second radio as long as your first radio is using one of the channels I recommended in a previous point.

If your Wi-Fi isn't remaining stable, the next thing I'd like to gather is information on how many devices are joined to each radio on the router. In the Wi-Fi statistics of the router's admin interface, there should be a count shown of how many devices are connected to 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. Let me know what you get here.

Also, when the Wi-Fi completely stops working, can you describe other symptoms it has? For example, does the network name stop appearing in your Wi-Fi networks list? Is the network un-joinable or the device is saying the password is incorrect? Does it connect but the device fails to obtain an IP address? Does the device say connected but nothing actually loads? Does your Wired network feel slower when the Wi-Fi breaks?

Also, do you have any network extenders? Especially ones not sold by Verizon.