Its the Network ... I hear it often

[carverofchoice]

Just adding a couple of related quotes to this thread subject.

In a recent AMA, one of the Wyze devs had this to say about connectivity and routers:

Connectivity is a difficult topic, and I know that it’s a bit of a meme that “it’s your WiFi” whenever you’re having connectivity issues. But WiFi routers are not only incredibly diverse, but also built to all sorts of different price points. There are WiFi routers that we will be able to connect to without any issue using a certain combination of parameters and timeouts, but will then struggle to connect to another router using those same values. There are also many different types of “offline” that a device can encounter. It’s sometimes really difficult to determine which kind of offline state we are in! Is the device having trouble getting DNS? Is your ISP down? Or maybe the Wyze cloud? Perhaps the environment has a lot of RF noise? All of these conditions require a specific flow in the connection code with timeout parameters that may or may not work on a specific brand of router. It may not be your WiFi but sometimes your WiFi doesn’t help what would otherwise be a minor issue to overcome. We are actively working on improving connectivity though and watch our fleet metrics like a hawk. It is incredibly important to us. - u/WyzeMitchell

And here’s an earlier AMA statement from the VP of Product, Steve McIrvin:

Thanks for the tough question! First, some data. We have metrics that show our overall connection rate, that is, how many activated cameras and other devices are currently able to connect to our cloud. We benchmark this against other similar companies and we’re objectively already ahead of the pack. However, we’re not satisfied with that and are consistently finding new root-cause issues that can drive this metric toward 100%.

As an example, we have a forthcoming product that, during testing, requires interaction with a ton of our existing products [I think here he was talking about the Wyze Mesh Routers which are now released]. This testing process has exposed many previously unknown edge-cases with existing products and has given us the telemetry we need to actually diagnose and solve the root cause. As this new product gets into the wild and our testing base increases, we’ll be able to cover even more scenarios that we previously didn’t know about, helping us improve even further.