I am using a Verizon CR1000A Router. My home has about a dozen Ethernet devices and 90 WiFi devices. Until last week everything was working just fine. Then a few days ago some of my WiFi devices, mostly the ESP nodes but including some Alexa devices would not connect to WiFi. On the ESP devices, wifi.connect() simply times out with a status of 1. In the past a reboot of the Router would get things working again. But now, yes a router reboot brings some of these devices back online, but other devices refuse to connect. Another router reboot and the list of unconnected devices gets shuffled. I can never predict which devices will connect and which won't. Sometimes it will be some Alexa devices, sometimes my Honeywell thermostats, most often some of my ESP devices, such as Sonoff Basic modules and my own DIY devices. There is no pattern- which devices connect is a crap shoot.
The problem is only with 2.4GHz WiFi. Ethernet and 5G are working just fine.
Any suggestions how to troubleshoot this would be appreciated. I am at the point of asking Verizon to send me a replacement router. Maybe doing a factory reset and start over?
What are your DHCP start and end IP addresses? If the difference is less than the number of devices you are trying to connect you wont be able to connect then all. See page 117 in the users guide.
sounds like someone hijacked your channel??
i use an app on my droid phone, wifianalyzer, helps in checking for a crowded channel..
most routers don't do such a great job of auto selecting channels but most all allow for manual selecting..
Not likely. I am in a rural area and most of my neighbors aren't very active on IP devices. But I will experiment with other WiFi channels.
The strangeness is mostly on ESP8266 devices. Some pre-built from Sonoff, etc and some DIY. I have five devices that I designed to take an MQTT message and display it on a 14-segment LED. Three of them are curently working and two won't connect. Except for the hostname and MQTT client name, the devices and programs are identical. If I reboot the router, which ones will connect is unpredictable.
Also a couple of my Alexa devices are currently unable to connect while others are connecting. Strange.
I would probably use a divide-and-conquer approach. Switch all your devices off, next switch e.g. ESP8266 device on (one-by one till they are all on). Can they all connect? Repeat but now with e.g. Alexa devices. Next repeat for whatever else you have.
Is it possible to draw any conclusions from that?
Note:
I'm not a networking person and I don't have your router.
I would start to predefine IP addresses in the DHCP for known devices (let the client still obtain a IP via DHCP from the 2..200 range, but let the router always assign the same DHCP IP by mac...).
With 90++ Wifi device, may be it is time to split the infra structure into IoT and non-IoT devices and use two VLANs.
A good theory. However, I have the same router and the firmware version is 3.2.0.14. There's nothing to tell me when this version was installed.
I'd be inclined to go divide and conquer too. First though, I might script a ping of every IP address the router offers and see if you can get any clue what's there.
Maybe. The UI doesn't give you many clues about where to find things and has a lot of settings down under 'Advanced' menus. In any event, I see no such thing.
I'd also be tempted in this case to put my own router in front of the network provider's router. I've done this with a *Mikrotik router and have defined 3 VLANs. I don't generally allow IOT devices to talk to the internet (except to specific hosts or specific protocols like NTP) and they can't even talk to each other, at least not over the WLANs.
*I don't necessarily recommend this though. It has a weird scripting language and has otherwise a proprietary architecture.
