Devices drop off WiFi

Just today, I upgraded my router from a Surf SOHO to a Balance One. I installed the latest 8.2.1 firmware.

The SOHO had this issue occasionally, but it seemed to get better with 8.2 firmware. I can’t remember the last time it happened with the SOHO. The Balance One has had this issue twice today, since I installed it at noon (it’s now 16:00), which is going to make the Balance One more or less useless.

The issue is with Nest devices. These are the only IoT devices I have, so I don’t know if it would happen with other manufacturers devices. I have them associated with a secondary SSID which is 2.4GHz only, and on it’s own VLAN, with only access to the internet, no access to other LAN resources.

It seems that all at once, all of the devices just disassociate from the AP. This happens possibly to all the devices at once, but it may not be exactly the same time. (The first I know is an alert 10 mins later saying the camera has stopped communicating with the service.) I can get them to reassociate if I change something on the AP, such as the SSID, or the Access control, then set it back a little while later.

These devices are from one manufacturer, but they are from at least four different code bases, but they do share source, so I’m not sure this is a Nest specific issue. (I used to work for Nest, so I am familiar with the internals of their products.)

It just happened again after another 40 mins. The two cameras dropped off within 2 sec of each other, and the status didn’t know they were disassociated.

@Barry_Twycross1250 ,

Based on the issue description , this is not a expected behavior. Would you please open a support ticket for support team to help verify the issue ?

You can send the ticket by using the following URL:
https://ticket.peplink.com/ticket/new/public

if you do a scan of the airwaves, any potential interference?

are you set to auto-channel or a static channel?

There was a strong signal on the channel, but I moved it, and it still fell over half an hour later.

I’ve been using a static channel.

I tried a few things.

I set the DHCP lease to 10 mins. Now the device will fall off the network, but still manage to renew the lease.

I connected my Mac to the IoT network while things were not working. I was getting 85% packet loss from one of the cameras when I pinged it. After changing the channel, so things reassociated that went to 13% packet loss.

I was pinging an external server, and it was getting 0% packet loss, until the same time as the cameras fell off the net. Then it started getting 40% packet loss.

The problem is definitely between the device and the access point. Pinging the cameras, it’s getting up to 30% packet loss, then suddenly 100% when the device falls off the net. I’d think it was a device problem, if it didn’t happen to all devices at once.

I propped up the unit so the devices would get a better signal, and the packet loss went down to 10% or less. Both cameras went offline at the same time as the packet loss went to 100%.

I’d suspect something is leaking buffers.

I opened a ticket.

https://ticket.peplink.com/ticket-conversation/22070173

I swapped the Surf SOHO back in. I’m getting near zero packet loss. This is the one which doesn’t have this issue anymore.

My guess is still that lost packets leak some resource.