I recently went through a wifi battle brought about from the purchase of a very inexpensive 2nd hand Halo. With my older Orbi mesh, it could not find any of my devices. I guess it's time to upgrade. Bought a pair of Amplifi Alien (made by the same company that makes Unifi) and out of the box, everything looked great. I could initialize my Halo, all my devices were working, "wow, that was easy"... until later in the day when the wifi disappeared. I had issues with the 2nd one, too. I tried troubleshooting with Amplifi tech support (actually fairly good experience), but no dice, returned them... back to the Orbi, and luckily my Halo stayed configured... However, I was still on the hunt for new wifi equipment.
More research led me to a pair of Asus XT9s. It is tri-band meaning it has 3 radios to support 2.4, 5 and 5.9GHz (wifi6). Out of the box, they worked OK, but I had a lot of problems with devices being dropped. There's a huge number of Asus router posts in on-line forums so there was a lot of suggestions to be tried, and through various tweaking, I got them to work well (touch wood). I haven't had a device disappear in 2+ days (it was 2 days ago that I stopped tweaking). This is what I did that seemed to work:
- Fixed IPs for all B&O devices
- Set fixed channels for 2.4 and 5GHz channels
- Set 2.4Ghz channel width to 20MHz (40 can theoretically have higher throughput, but it also may cause interference)
- Turned off 160Mhz channel width for 5GHz channel
- Turn off all the fancy features, anything with "smart" in the name.
- Turn off beam forming on everything but the intra-router backhaul channel (5.9Ghz)
So, why buy a fancy router with all these neat features and then turn them all off? Because I have a lot of older devices on my network (I would consider all pre-Mozart beosounds to be "older") that seem to get confused by this stuff. Yes, these features are mostly supposed to be backward compatible, but that is only what the specifications say, not necessarily what gets implemented in products. Also, these features generally support higher bandwidth and better roaming. I don't believe my devices need higher bandwidth, and most are fixed in terms of placement. I am seeing better wifi performance with my phone and laptop so there is something to gained (although maybe this is just placebo... I didn't run any speed tests before/after).
The one thing I haven't tried is re-setting up my Halo. On the one hand, my Halo is working fine so why mess with success? Then again, if it doesn't work, maybe I should look for different routers... however, then I'd be without my Halo until I found some new routers that actually worked which seems much more difficult than it should be. Yes, I like my Halo (not at $900, but at $150 it's a neat device). Roll the dice...