WiFi access points don’t fail very often, but they can - even really good ones. I am running four Meraki enterprise grade access points at home. About a week ago I did a frequency shuffle on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz channels in use. Of course it took a while for my 22 Wyze cameras to figure out that the access points had moved in frequency. Most did fine, but a few required a power cycle. However some of the cameras either would not connect, or became extremely unreliable. The interesting part is that the Meraki management system said that the cameras were connected, and had good signals - some of the failing cameras were withing 10 feet of an access point. None of the phones or game consoles were having any problems at all. I had power cycled cameras repeatedly, rebooted the access points, changed frequencies again, rebooted the network switches, disabled and enabled switch ports on network switches - all without any real improvement.
After a while, I determined that it was one particular AP that seemed to be the problem. Last night I swapped out that AP with a spare, and when I got up this morning, my cameras were all happy.
So it looks like something went nuts in the AP - only on 2.4 GHz connections either when or right after I made the frequency shuffle. Fortunately, the Meraki enterprise equipment is lifetime warranteed, so gotta work on an RMA…
well done. many dont have the knowledge to look at the equipment from your perspective but if one thing can be taken from this hopefully it is that even amongst the good equipment….things happen.
taking the painstaking time to trouble shoot will often lead to the correct path and oddly sometimes it is not the most obvious. I dont think I would’ve even figure it out, I would’ve gotten through about 3/4ths of what you did before I would’ve blamed the cameras more than likely and gone on a buying spree. which would’ve lead me to the same old problem and mass confusion.
im glad you got it all sorted out but I’m even more happy that you took the time to write a detailed report of your experience including what the problem ended up being. I hope others learn from this, I know I did.
Thanks Bam. IP networking is a fairly large part of my job these day, so I’m pretty good at it (at least at the level I deal with - I have friends that blow me away). Let’s just say that my home network is not your typical home network - either the networking or the WiFi.
Thanks for this info. I at times seem to have had sporadic and explainable issues with a couple of Camera’s. I am able to work it out, but was trying to figure out why. Should have looked at the different AP’s. I do have replacement devices which I am hooking up tomorrow and increasing my internal bandwidth.
I have had similar issues when one of my switches went bad. One of the devices on the switch kept failing, until I rebooted the device, then it would run fine for a short period of time and start failing again.