Failure to accept connections on 2.4gHz band back again.

[Ksaro1]

After making a modification to my BiPAC 8800AXL R2 ( Fw version 2.52.d15) to up the number of maximum connection to 24 my router had been functioning fine. I've now added a single WiFi extender to my network, which uses the 2.4gHz band, and I am now finding that at least once daily that all connections on this band no longer work. I get errors indicating that they are either connected to the router but they do not have an Internet connection or the connection fails. I have enabled 3 guest SSID's to each of the 2.4gHz and 5gHz bands. The main SSID fails to connect and the guest SSID's do connect, but indicate that there is no internet connection.

I had been rebooting the router to get the connections working again. However, today, I looked at the configuration on the router via an Ethernet connection to the router. I upped the max connections on the 2.4gHz band to 32 and applied the setting. Now all devices are connected and have internet connections. I didn't have to reboot in order for the connections to work again either. I just applied the changes and the connections all began working as expected.

I am nowhere near the maximum of 24 devices, much less 32, on the 2.4gHz band. So, why this behaviour? And why was it working fine until I add a single device to the network?

As the Subject line of this thread implies, this is a recurring issue. I have had the same symptoms before only to find that the factory default settings of the maximum connections for both 2.4gHz and 5gHz bands were too low according to a Billion engineer who replied to my earlier posting. Since upping this value to 24 for both channels the issue disappeared until i've now added an additional device that uses the 2.4gHz band.

There is nothing in the logs to show any unusual behaviour to explain this too.

[billion_fan]

After making a modification to my BiPAC 8800AXL R2 ( Fw version 2.52.d15) to up the number of maximum connection to 24 my router had been functioning fine. I've now added a single WiFi extender to my network, which uses the 2.4gHz band, and I am now finding that at least once daily that all connections on this band no longer work. I get errors indicating that they are either connected to the router but they do not have an Internet connection or the connection fails. I have enabled 3 guest SSID's to each of the 2.4gHz and 5gHz bands. The main SSID fails to connect and the guest SSID's do connect, but indicate that there is no internet connection.

I had been rebooting the router to get the connections working again. However, today, I looked at the configuration on the router via an Ethernet connection to the router. I upped the max connections on the 2.4gHz band to 32 and applied the setting. Now all devices are connected and have internet connections. I didn't have to reboot in order for the connections to work again either. I just applied the changes and the connections all began working as expected.

I am nowhere near the maximum of 24 devices, much less 32, on the 2.4gHz band. So, why this behaviour? And why was it working fine until I add a single device to the network?

As the Subject line of this thread implies, this is a recurring issue. I have had the same symptoms before only to find that the factory default settings of the maximum connections for both 2.4gHz and 5gHz bands were too low according to a Billion engineer who replied to my earlier posting. Since upping this value to 24 for both channels the issue disappeared until i've now added an additional device that uses the 2.4gHz band.

There is nothing in the logs to show any unusual behaviour to explain this too.

Strange is the extender running on a different SSID? Also try setting the DTIM Interval = 1, Beacon Interval = 50 (under the advanced 2.4ghz settings)

[Ksaro1]

@billion_fan- the extender is connecting to the Billion router via one of the guest SSID's. It does also advertise its own SSID for other devices to connect to as an extension of the Billion's network. So, I'm not sure which SSID you mean by 'running on'?

I'll see how things work now that I've changed the one setting. If I see the same problems again, then I'll try the other settings that you mention.

Thanks for your help and quick reply.

Oh - FWIW - I've added this extender because it also has a single Ethernet port, which allows a device to connect to the extender via Ethernet. I've done this to attach my Sky Q box to the extender because the Sky Q boxes have notoriously poorly engineered Wifi modules and they work much more reliably when using their Ethernet module. Since I'm not able to wire the SkyQ box to my Billion router's Ethernet port, I'm using this extender to extend the Ethernet connection of the Sky Q box via WiFi. This works as expected as long as the Billion router maintains the device connections on the 2.4gHz band though.

[Ksaro1]

More bizarre behaviour from the 8800AXL again this morning.

• All connections on all 2.4gHz band SSIDs showed no internet.

• All 5gHz band SSIDs and Ethernet connected devices were accessing the internet no problem

• I set all parameters as suggested by billion_fan and that had no effect

• I rebooted the 8800AXL and that had no effect

• I power cycled the 8800AXL and all connections were working

Is this a warning of some H/W issue with the 8800AXL, since it's been working fine for a few years now?

[billion_fan]

More bizarre behaviour from the 8800AXL again this morning.

• All connections on all 2.4gHz band SSIDs showed no internet.

• All 5gHz band SSIDs and Ethernet connected devices were accessing the internet no problem

• I set all parameters as suggested by billion_fan and that had no effect

• I rebooted the 8800AXL and that had no effect

• I power cycled the 8800AXL and all connections were working

Is this a warning of some H/W issue with the 8800AXL, since it's been working fine for a few years now?

I don't think its a hardware issue as once power cycled the 2.4ghz starting working again, and also it was still broadcasting the SSID.

Try disabling the guest SSID's and see how it goes. (2.4ghz band)

[Ksaro1]

I've now disabled all guest SSIDs on the 2.4gHz band of my 8800AXL router and I've had a week of stable connections. Not a single connected device has been denied or dropped connection for the entire week.

This leads me to wonder though - why offer guest SSIDs if they aren't stable?

I am still using guest SSIDs on the 5gHz band and they are stable.

[billion_fan]

I've now disabled all guest SSIDs on the 2.4gHz band of my 8800AXL router and I've had a week of stable connections. Not a single connected device has been denied or dropped connection for the entire week.

This leads me to wonder though - why offer guest SSIDs if they aren't stable?

I am still using guest SSIDs on the 5gHz band and they are stable.

We have to see what Broadcom come back with as they write the drivers etc

[zathred]

I had similar problems with guest WiFi and interface grouping on the 8800AXL R2. I noticed that the DHCP table had no entries for most of the devices using the network when either function was used. Logging into the router with telnet and using the LANHOSTS SHOW ALL command reveled that all but one of the DHCP leases had a zero remaining lease time and that the same IP address had then been issued to more than one client which then caused havoc within the network.

This appears to be a defect in the firmware which I have not been able to workaround and this renders both the guest WiFi and interface grouping unusable which is disappointing

[zathred]

I've worked-around the disappearing DHCP leases when using guest SSID and/or interface grouping by creating static DHCP entries for every device on the network. Not ideal as this requires manual update when any new device is connected but it has allowed me to use the grouping functionality to isolated the broadcast storm from my SKY Q tv box which otherwise floods the network including the Wi-Fi causing slow downs and drop outs. It'll have to do for now.

[zathred]

It seems that if the Billion udhcpcd DHCP server has to provide IP addresses for more than one subnet then it resets the lease time for all current leases in the subnet to zero whenever a device requests a new or renewed lease. The only way to retain the existing leases is to have just one subnet being served. This appears to be a bug in the version of udhcpcd used on the router and I'm surprised it was not detected during testing.

The alternative work-around is to disable the 8800AXLs own DHCP server for all but the default interface group and statically assign IP address locally on devices attached to the other groups. Again this only works for small-scale static device allocations like the Sky-Q box.

Another work-around is to use the Billion DHCP relay option to send the DHCP requests to another device on the network but then that is more complexity and another point of failure to manage.

I've used a Raspberry Pi to create a guest access point rather than using the Billion guest SSIDs to allow the Pi to both isolate the guests from the main subnet and to act as the DHCP server for the guest network