Everyone is making GREAT points about how other devices working well on a router is mostly irrelevant. I love the insights.
- WiFi Band and congestion. These can make a HUGE difference as people mentioned above.
- Band and channel signal interference: there may be interference locally for your Wyze devices on the 2.4GHz band/channel that is not affecting other devices
- Signal obstruction: related to, but not directly the same as signal interference.
- Router device prioritization. This is particularly an issue with gaming routers. They will almost always give priority to Gaming consoles, Streaming devices (TVs, computers, Phones, tablets, TiVo, etc), often at the expense of other devices. If you have a Gaming router, that can actually be a huge negative, rather than a positive factor. A lot of routers will also deprioritize 2.4GHz, and sometimes they can issues trying to force them to try checking if they can switch to a different band. Often, routers will make sure some devices stay connected with a good experience and give memory and CPU time to those, and let others choke and stutter. People blame the choking/stuttering device/company when the issue happens to primarily be the router’s decision-making process when it has to choose which device to screw over when live processing resources are limited. So many other examples could be given with prioritization.
- QoS is related to prioritization, but it can cause some devices to have major connectivity issues since it can delay them from having an absolutely live, consistent connection. If you rely on IoT devices like cameras, I would turn off QoS. It is often a major culprit for connectivity issues.
- WMM (WiFi Multimedia) is another known setting culprit that causes some devices to work perfectly fine and others to have major problems. This is much more likely with a Gaming router and has been demonstrated to be the main problem for some people.
- Network/Router Overload is also related to prioritization and was sort of addressed above. Some routers have device limits, while ALL routers have RAM and CPU limits even if you don’t hit the device limitations. This is a big problem with streaming. The more RAM and CPU cores in the router, the better, and sometimes you can distribute the load through Mesh routers, but your modem and root router will still always have resource limits even if you’re not ever using your full bandwidth.
- Distance and -dBM strength. Do not go based on “bars” for signal strength. Bars literally mean NOTHING. There is no standard for how many bars something is, especially cross-band comparison, or cross-brand/device comparison, etc. You could have a device with fewer bars actually have a better signal and connection than another device with more bars. comparison of bars means nothing. A good general consideration is to keep ALL devices with a -dBM number with a lower value than -70dBM. (0 to -70) and the closer to 0, the better…but again, you can’t necessarily judge that number between bands, etc, and devices can be a little different in their needs.
There are SOOOO many reasons why some devices may work perfectly fine while others don’t, and the issue could still 100% be the fault of the router, or the environment, etc, not necessarily the fault of the Wyze devices not working right. The above are just a few examples that could be the reason.
If Wyze was 100% the problem, then there wouldn’t be so many people who rarely to never have issues with them at all (including myself ever since I changed ISP’s and Routers). That is something to consider carefully.
Regardless, I am glad Wyze does take responsibility upon themselves to try to improve this as much as possible, despite already objectively being ahead of the pack as far as connection rates benchmarks go. I know everyone does appreciate that they are working to make more improvements for those who are frustrated: