Ok what’s going on?
So eventually with winter kicked in and cabin fever and boredom kicking my butt, I set out to poke around the home network and sort it out. My thought was that the repeater setup was probably not great, since the upstairs router was in half-duplex mode, both providing a network as well as acting as a client. I quickly discovered extremely high ping times, sometimes as much as over a second. Well I did what most people would think to do, and rebooted the routers. That seemed to fix it and it was back to single digit ping times and working great again. Sweet – easy fix! Or so I thought. Again.
Well laziness kicked in and that became the fix, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, but rebooting it was a quick fix I needed to keep going as life just kept getting in the way,. Eventually the issues got to me, and after adding even more Sonos speakers and more home automation, it got to a point where the network was clearly overloaded and hemorrhaging. Time to make a change. It also became apparent that the equipment was several years old and likely just needed to be replaced. Or did it?
First I started fiddling with the routers themselves – they work great after a reboot, so that tells me the wifi itself was OK, the signal was OK, but something in software was acting up. I fiddled with some settings like the 2.4ghz and 5ghz channel bandwidth, which did provide some relief, but still had issues.
Next I changed the upstairs router to connect ONLY to the 5ghz ssid on the main router, which also provided a little more reliability (even though 2ghz generally has better range). Again, a little better, but still needed reboots. I started to think the reboot requirement was due to a network loop, potentially via WIFI.
I’m not sure how, but eventually the Sonos speakers really acting up led me to fiddle with them a bit, and I found that having 2 trusted WIFI networks listed on the Sonos system must have caused a loop in itself, because removing one REALLY woke things up. I think so far this was the first notable change, however, it still acted up.