Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
This becomes an issue when both 2.4 and 5 Ghz SSIDs are the same. The device sees the name, but joins the wrong channel.
If the device doesn’t have the necessary hardware to do 5GHz how could it see that SSID?
Well that’s a good question but I’ve had it happen. But only when the SSIDs for both bands are the same.
I don’t fully understand how this happens, but @gigastacey wrote about it affecting mesh networks:
1 Like
I had this with an early Ring doorbell trying to connect it to a mesh.
Could it be when an IoT device has an app that’s used to configure the device (like tell it what WiFi to connect to?)
So you have the app running on a 5GHz capable phone giving channel info to the IoT device that its hardware can’t support?
Maybe, but in reality the device will need just the SSID and password to reconnect on its own in the future. In that case, it may appear to fail because the two SSIDs are separate broadcast domains, and the phone can’t send a broadcast “ping” to the device and see it, even if it gets successfully connected to 2.4GHz while the phone is connected to 5GHz. (i.e. the app is poorly written/designed.)
1 Like
Whatever it was, I’ve not had this issue for ages so something’s been fixed somewhere. Most Ring devices are still 2.4 GHz AFAIK. Ring Customer Support used to tell you they weren’t compatible with mesh, and to keep a dedicated WiFi configured, but that was years ago.
This is outright wrong. See Multi-SSID Deployment Considerations - Cisco Meraki in particular:
In terms of IP networking, there is exactly one definition of a broadcast domain. Please stop making a fool of yourself on this topic.