Any One Else Having Intermittent Loss of 2.4 GHz Band

[0388279]

Hi All:

I just purchased as RT-AX88U router. Within a day of installation I lost the 2.4 GHz band. I was not able to find it's SSID and all of my 2.4 GHz band devices stopped functioning. The 5 GHz band continued to function normally. By re-booting the router I was able to restore 2.4 GHz service.

The odd thing is that I have had two other routers do the same thing to me in recent weeks: my old RT-AC3100 and a new Netgear RAX80.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be going on?

Don Barar

 

[Howard2k]

You may have a glut of noise in the 2.4Ghz space. The fact that it’s happening to multiple devices tends to point to that. 2.4Ghz is also used for Bluetooth. And it suffers from interference from badly shielded USB3 connections, microwave ovens, fluorescent lights, lots of kids toys etc.

 

[0388279]

Hi Howard:

Thank you for writing. I do not believe this be a simple interference issue. If it were, I would expect intermittent loss of signal. But that is not what is going on. Once, i loose the 2.4 GHz band, it is gone and lost forever until I re-boot the router. Then, service is immediately restored until the next outage. To me this seems like more of hardware/firmware issue. I believe the routers I have been tried from both ASUS and NetGear may be using the same brand if not same internal hardware.

But I do seem to making some progress. Recently, I set channel bandwidth from 20/40 MHz to 20 MHz. Since, I made that change three days ago I have yet to experience a loss of 2.4 GHz band. Only time will tell.

Don Barar

 

[Howard2k]

Even if you have a spectrum analyzer handy, there's not really any such thing as a simple interference issue. .
Certainly that could be the case too - a compatibility issue, but I'm a little skeptical.

Some of the Apple platforms do share wifi components, and you're right, some routers do too. I have heard that the MBPro 2016-2018 (and 2019?) have issues with some specific router chipsets, for example. But you've got a pretty diverse set of Apple hardware:

* 2016 MBPro
* 2014 MBA
* 2018 Mini
* iPad Pro
* iPhone 8
* Apple Watch S3
* Apple TV

No way those are all using the same chipset.

Your routers appear to be using:
RAX80 - Broadcom BCM43684
RT-AC1300 - Broadcom BCM47094, BCM4366 and BCM4366
RT-AX88U - Broadcom BCM43684

So there is some overlap there. But I wouldn't expect the issue to be present on all devices, and based on what I've read previously the affected folks would have their MBPro 2016 drop the network but their 2014 iMac (for example) would stay active.

The MBPro and 2018 iMac Pro share the same wifi IIRC, and in those cases the issues would be present on those but not on a 2015 MBPro for example.

So I don't think it's a compatibility issue, but I could be wrong.