Wyze Cam issues on new Asus mesh wireless

Cameras
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Hey all,

I’ve been using Wyze cams for over 5 years now, and they’ve worked okay enough. I understand they’re cheap and put up with the jank for the most part.

Recently I replaced an aging Linksys WiFi 6 mesh system with an ASUS ZenWiFi BE30000 mesh system. I live in an 1800 sq ft rancher and have 3 nodes set up on both ends of the house and one in the middle. All other wireless devices seem to work fairly well, including other IoT devices on the 2.4ghz band.

I created a dedicated IoT 2.4ghz network on the Asus router just for my cameras and went through resetting them all to get them on this new network. The end result is connection instability on all the units, no matter where they are. Units inside the house that are 10 feet away from the router they are connected to will just stop transmitting/receiving for seconds to minutes at a time.

I’m usually able to initially connect to the units and audio/video works fine, but when viewing for more than a few seconds, I’ll notice the transmit rate fall to 0 and then the camera will just freeze. They always seem to eventually reconnect and start broadcasting again, but this isn’t exactly ideal or expected behavior.

I have a mix of V1 and V3 cameras, along with a garage door unit. 5 cameras in total.

This is what I’ve tried so far in troubleshooting the issue.

  • Rebooting all mesh nodes
  • Rebooting and checking firmware on cameras
  • Creating a dedicated SSID for just 2.4ghz devices
  • Adjusting roaming assistance to off, in case it was a signal issue
  • Changing channels on 2.4ghz
  • Changing 2.4ghz from 20/40hz to just 20hz
  • Formatting all SD Cards in the units

I may have to swap back to the old Linksys router to see if the stability is indeed better on that gear, as I didn’t observe any problems when on that mesh system. Before I do that, I’m looking for any advice or tips that might help alleviate this issue. I already checked to make sure that Airtime Fairness is disabled, and it seems to be by default on the IoT network I created.

Thanks in advance.

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Just something to keep in mind that when you create a dedicated 2.4GHz network, if it is isolated from your LAN everything gets looped over the internet, nothing is on a local network unless your device that hosts the app is on the same isolated network. For people with good ISP not an issue, for some it might be a deal breaker.

Have you checked this thread in Tips and Ticks?

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As @habib mentioned, when you set up a guest network and set “access intranet” to disabled, it isolates it completely (some models even use VLANs to separate it). It also enables client isolation so even if you put your phone/viewing device on the same guest network, it won’t be able to talk directly to the cams. I have experience with Asus routers and they do work fine with Wyze cams on an isolated guest, at least the ones I’ve set up.

This means all video streams through Wyze’s servers (out to the internet and back in). I have not seen an issue with this in my setup which also totally isolates the traffic and streams via Wyze, but you need to make sure your internet connection is stable and has enough upload bandwidth.

If the below items don’t work, you could try turning on “access intranet” temporarily to see if it makes any difference, allowing direct streaming. If it does, may need to look at your internet service and see if it is having any issues or slow upload speed etc.

Another thing to check, if the Asus is defaulting to WPA2/3 transition mode (which many do), you probably want to set your IOT network to WPA2 only. The Wyze cams you’re using don’t support WPA3 and that mixed mode can be problematic.

Other things to check
Disable “universal beamforming” on at least the 2.4ghz network (might as well do 5ghz for your other devices too). It is a problematic and fairly useless technology. You can leave Explicit/AC/AX beamforming enabled, not many devices use it and for the ones that do, it usually works fairly well.

Airtime fairness disabled - sounds like you already did.

MIMO - usually works fine. But you could try disabling it to see if it makes any difference.

Trend micro AIProtection - actually usually works well without false positives but check and see if it might be blocking anything.

Leave your 2.4 on 20mhz - sounds like you already changed that

Are you running any QoS on the asus? If so that might be interfering.

Roaming - if your nodes are too close together, that can cause problems (too much signal is almost as bad as not enough). Especially if you have the roaming assistant or smart connect type features enabled.

Some things to try there (even if just temporary):
Disable band steering (the feature that tries to force clients to 5ghz from 2.4).
Assign cams to the closest node so they aren’t attempting to roam
Move the nodes further apart or shut them off temporarily to see if there is any difference. 3 might be a bit much for 1800 sq ft but it depends on the construction of the house.

1 Like
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@dave27 - Please post this response to everyone that complains about the app not working.

I’m so glad @K-Med posted this question with a good amount of detail on their steps.

This thread clearly details the complexity of networking that the common users out there have NO idea about but will immediately jump to the conclusion that the app is bad.

1 Gb Fiber internet is NOT the benchmark for how good your network is. There is much much more behind this.

I look forward to the solution. This is good stuff.

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Yeah unfortunately that seems to be the first thing people turn to (not @K-Med obviously, but in many other threads). If only it was that easy.

Though I’m sure your ISP will happily tell you upgrading to their highest tier will solve all your problems. Your car will even run better…

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I’ll be reviewing this post and trying all the suggested toggles on the router this week. I’m actually a network engineer for a large hospital system here, so I have a tiny bit of networking knowledge. :slight_smile:

Networking isn’t that easy and isolating each variable is really the key to figuring these things out, if there is a solution, because sometimes there’s just an incompatibility that’s beyond your control.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the thread!

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This is so true. And also, with all the variables, you technically need to change 1 thing at a time and test… turn too many knobs, it’s hard to tell what helped or hurt.

Please report back! You will rescue many a Wyze owner no doubt.

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Go to the AiMesh tab of the Asus router’s web admin. Verify that no camera is trying to connect to the wrong node.

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This tab also has “System Settings->System Reboot”. This is more convenient than rebooting each node.

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Another thing worth noting, Asus uses VLANs and different subnets to isolate Guest Wireless 1 (and allow it to propagate to the nodes). Where Guest 2 and 3 just use Layer2 firewall filters and share the same subnet as your LAN. Even within Guest 1, there is one VLAN/subnet for 2.4ghz and a different one for 5ghz. IPTABLES Layer 3 firewall rules are in place between them.

I can’t recall if I’ve ever tried to set up Wyze on Guest 1 of an Asus router, but my setup also uses VLAN segmentation for the IOT network and it doesn’t cause issues, so I wouldn’t think that would be a problem. But that could be another thing to try - move the SSID and password over to guest 2 or 3 and reboot the cams so they get a new IP, just to see if that has anything to do with it or not. In theory it should just cause the same “loop via the internet” behavior, but maybe somehow it is interfering.

Some of their routers actually use VLANs for all of the guest networks now, but I don’t believe your setup is one of them.

Note that when you use Guest 2 and 3, clients connected to the nodes will not be isolated from your main LAN even if that feature is turned on (that’s why Guest 1 was changed to work differently). Not even sure if it will let you put Guest 2 and 3 on the nodes or not.

2 Likes
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When setting up the IoT network, I actually did choose the “Use same subnet as main network” option to avoid any issues by having it on a different subnet with a different gateway address. I don’t think that’s my issue, but something I’ll try after I try all the suggestions people gave me. Thanks @dave27

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OK just looked yours up and it does have the new “Guest Network Pro” features which lets you choose more granular options for each one. I haven’t used Wyze with that but no reason it would be any different than the ones that have the regular guest network.

Nice thing about that setup is from what I understand, you can set up firewall rules to allow certain traffic between guest and LAN so could probably get the direct streaming (not via internet) working.

Although that makes me curious about whether the guest network is actually being sent to the nodes and whether it is actually isolating properly if it is. In the past with the regular guest network, using the same subnet meant clients on the nodes were not totally isolated when on the same subnet, due to no VLAN segmentation. But they may have implemented some more filtering to make that work.

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So, I think I’ve ruled out a couple of things by what I just did.

I’ve gone ahead and bound each camera to the closest node in the system. This was pretty straightforward, even though I had never done it before. From there, I went and started a continuous ping to all the cameras.

They all lose the occasional ping, which is to be expected on 2.4, but some are definitely acting worse than others, and it seems to be the two Wyze V3 cameras. Those seem to go offline on the app at the same time I start seeing pings drop and really high ping times.

I did turn off Universal Beamforming, but otherwise they’re all sitting on the IoT network, on the same subnet as my main network and AP Isolation on/off doesn’t seem to make any difference.

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With AP isolation enabled you shouldn’t be able to ping them at all, but that may be where the shared subnet not isolating clients on different nodes is coming into play.

If you enable intranet access and disable AP isolation then it is basically just a second SSID on your main LAN so it shouldn’t be anything to do with guest networks at that point, so probably focus on the other stuff and try to narrow it down. Seems like there is some setting the v3s may not like.

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Okay, update on this. I noticed my wireless smart plugs going offline yesterday as well. They are also on the 2.4ghz band. I think I have a general 2.4ghz problem, not a Wyze problem. I’m going to keep troubleshooting.

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Maybe try the Merlin version of firmware. Perhaps it fixes your problems. I was using it before, but I reverted to the stock. Switching between the stock and Merlin versions is easy.

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I don’t think that one supports merlin, probably has the Mediatek chipset (he only does Broadcom).

Luckily the stock Asus firmware does still let you tweak a lot of wireless settings.

@k-med another thing you may want to try is setting 2.4ghz to “N only”. In theory the AX 2.4ghz should work perfectly fine with N devices like IOTs, even potentially improve things, but “theory” being the key word.