Whether we are talking to an old friend. Talking to our kids or spouse. Asking for help on a blog. Talking to a smart device. It all comes down to how we communicate. Sometimes we have to speak a little louder or softer. Sometimes we have to be clearer. A lot of times we just say something and hope that it was heard and understood. Once in a while we have to face someone or get out the hearing aids. Now to my point.
I was having a lot of issues with my TP-link devices going offline. Some of these were only a few feet from a router. I decided to upgrade my network in hopes that this would help. I put in a 3-device mesh network. It really did not seem to help. I did find some settings that made it a little better. But my garage just seemed to not be covered. So, I got another router and added it to my mesh. That helped a little. I also notice the devices in my Gazebo went offline quite a bit and my wife complained about the Wi-Fi out there. Well, another router worked in the garage, why not the Gazebo. After adding another router to the Gazebo, I started noticing I was getting tp-link devices going offline again as well as Zigbee devices going offline. I know that both devices communicate in the 2.4ghz band, so it got me thinking. Maybe I was now SHOUTING. It turns out that by adding more routers, I was causing a traffic jam. I had too much WI-FI in the air. I was blocking the Zigbee devices from being able to communicate now.
I ended up moving my routers around so that I did not have as much overlap. In my Gazebo, I swapped out the router for an Ubiquiti AP and turned the power down so that it only covered a small area. This fixed the devices that dropped out most often.
Sometimes more is not always better. I have not had a single device drop out since I implemented these changes.
22,500 sq ft property.
(5) Rpi4 OH servers all with Zigbee
(50) Tp-link devices
(22) Zigbee devices
(10) Amazon Echo devices
Like I frequently say, WiFi and wireless in general, is voodoo black magic mambo jumbo.
Good share!
When a single AP cannot cover your full area, you should definitely invest in a mesh Wi-Fi solution.
Get router and repeaters from one vendor and make use of their proprietary meshing solution. Don’t attempt to manually combine WiFi components from multiple vendors, that’s an almost safe road to ruin.
PS: and use Ethernet interconnects
My devices are the Tp-Link Deco XE-75 and they are ethernet connected. The one issue I had was that I could not turn down the power on them. So, I did use another device that I could do that on for the Gazebo. It is only covering about 500 sq ft with the power setting.
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