Home automation

[basin-bob]

Hello all

Need some help please.

Having problems with home automation, worked fine with previous supplier (Voda) but now all kinds of problems such as intermittent working or just not working at all. Pairing sometimes but then disconnects and fails then will not pair with the network.

I think this is to do with the 2.4 and 5 ghz ability of the router. The home automation needs 2.4 and the router is not smart enough to know that the item will not work on 5 ghz. 

I think the random working is on the occasion that the router does connect at 2.4 ghz.

the Voda router seems to have been able to decipher what the home automation item required. 

any ideas please

[basin-bob]

Thanks for this, I will give it a try over the weekend. Just got to work out how to do it.

Twice now I have found my upstairs Alexa saying she is having problems connecting to the internet and had to reset it. It’s driving me mad at the moment. You never know what’s going to stop working and when. 

thanks again 

[Birchcroft]

First of all note that I use a 3rd Party router and am not familier with TalkTalk's routers or their configuration options.   That said, it is not uncommon for dual band routers to use the same SSID for both the 5 & 2.4GHz bands and employ a technique called "band Steering" to optimise performance by selecting the best band for a device.  This can in some cases result in delay for 2.4GHz devices joining the network.  I therefore  suggest you try the following to see if the situation improves:

1. If possible disable "band steering".
2. If this is the case change the SSID of the 5GHz band so it is different to that of the of the 2.4GHz band.  This will 'separate' the bands and mean device it only tries to join the selected band.  That is it effectively disables "band steering".
3. If possible disable the 5GHz WiFi so the router only uses the 2.4GHz band.

[basin-bob]

Hi and thanks for your response.

The Router is huawei. 

what’s puzzling though, is that although all of the kit is 2.4 ghz only, some of it is working fine whilst others are not. As an example, yesterday evening I managed to get two of my Magic Home bulbs paired up and working through Alexa. They are part of a group of three bulbs and an LED strip. One bulb and the LED strip have continued to work without issue. By the time I went to bed the two I am now having problems with had stopped working and were no longer on the network. 

Neighbour's are not an issue as fortunately my nearest one is at least 1/2 a click away.

I did chat to TT technical help, but you only have to read the reply’s to understand the agent was not technical. 

[martswain]

If the smart device is only 2.4 GHz capable then the router will only try and connect to it using that band.

The fact that the router is also transmitting on 5 Ghz  is irrelevant in your scenario.

If you have the Sagemcom hub it has a feature called WiFi optimisation which supposedly selects the best channel, even overriding your manual channel selection, this can cause issues and can only be disabled by TT staff.

You can request that here, then select the least congested 2.4 Ghz channel manually in the router after using a freely available WiFi analyser app to check you local environment.

Irrespective of whether the router is changing channels automatically, you should use an app to check for WiFi interference from your neighbours.