OK I was recently out of town traveling and the first day I was away from home, my network, and more specifically my smart home, basically completely fell apart. No matter what I did, I could not restore it remotely. Working with support also failed completely. After getting home I was able to narrow down the problem(s) (plural).
Problems:
1) devices being kicked off of my WiFi. I run 3 AP7s, and I thought the limitation was 110 devices per AP, not total. So what is the total number of wireless devices support per AP7, and overall total? Example: My Wife’s MacBook got kicked off the WiFi and I had to walk her through finding an Ethernet cable and connecting it wired. Luckily that worked.
2) Wired devices randomly being disconnected. To be fair, these aren’t normal wired devices, but each one of my wired device gateways (Thread or Zigbee) are getting kicked off the network randomly. I have multiple devices (4 different Zigbee hubs, and at least as many Thread border routers, although ironically I haven’t seen the wireless one be randomly kicked off). One example is my Sonoff Dongle Max which is used to as the primary Zigbee Gateway for my Home Assistant instance. The big problem with this one is that all my plug in switches that I use to reboot devices, don’t do anything if I can’t communicate with them. I’m move this one specifically to a USB-C interface so Home Assistant can at least reboot things when needed.
I am going to be honest, at this point I am considering swapping out my AP7’s, and as much as I hate to say this, even my Gold Pro. And I am certainly not buying the Firewalla Switches I was going to buy.
So my question is the subject of this post, what are the max device counts on the network. I admit I have over 110 total WiFi devices, and an even higher count of IPv6 devices behind the Zigbee and Matter bridges. But I expect my network to just work, or at least for me to be able to remotely debug it when it completely fails (every time I had my wife reboot something, things got worse not better). I’m back up to running after switching pretty much everything to basic mode a power cycling everything. Right now I’m afraid to touch things. I feel like I’ve built a bigger network than my system can handle. So I need to understand how big a network what I have is capable of.
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