After messing with the Deco settings for way too many hours - in many, many attempts to workaround the bugs, I can say with almost absolute certainty that the Main, Guest, and IOT networks have frequency conflicts with each other. If you have 2.4Ghz on your main network and either IOT or Guest, all your 2.4Ghz devices will have bad connectivity. If you isolate the frequencies (Main as 5Ghz only and Guest as 2.4Ghz only), the connectivity issues clear up quickly.

That is all. Still find the latest firmware to be very unstable.

xjsimon wrote

After messing with the Deco settings for way too many hours - in many, many attempts to workaround the bugs, I can say with almost absolute certainty that the Main, Guest, and IOT networks have frequency conflicts with each other. If you have 2.4Ghz on your main network and either IOT or Guest, all your 2.4Ghz devices will have bad connectivity. If you isolate the frequencies (Main as 5Ghz only and Guest as 2.4Ghz only), the connectivity issues clear up quickly.

That is all. Still find the latest firmware to be very unstable.

  @xjsimon 

I tend to think that you are onto something here.

  @Holocron I stumbled onto this solution last night myself also. It's been less than 24 hours since implementing and so far so good.  I have devices on the main network that don't have 5g and now need to be moved to 2.4 network.

Between loss of features from their app "update" and  signal instability from their firmware "update" has me ready to cut my losses and leave the deco brand.

  @David-TP Hey, can you go answer this post? https://community.tp-link.com/us/home/forum/topic/623596

For anyone following along these issues, I got a new firmware upgrade yesterday. I installed 1.2.8 yesterday and things actually started to look better! I didn't have a lot of time to test, but my cameras were much more responsive.

This morning TPLink support asked me to try the beta of 1.2.9. I had a bunch of problems with some of the units not getting the manual update. I had to restart a bunch and go to some Deco units directly and reset power. After a bunch of that, the network started to stabilize.

It's actually now looking pretty good. Cameras are pretty responsive now.

I don't want to declare victory yet as I've seen this happen - where everything improves and then after a few hours the network degrades and never recovers (even after reboots). 

So, it's looking good as of now on 1.2.9 and my guess is there was a fix that actually went in 1.2.8 that helped with stability for 2.4Ghz devices.

I haven't tested the IOT and Guest networks, so I'm not sure if those bugs have been fixed.

Hopefully others can get testing on the newer firmwares.

  @xjsimon Is that 1.28 supposed to be production or beta? I have 1.2.7 and not getting any alerts.
 

What version of the hardware do you have?

  @Holocron 

I saw 1.2.8 as a production firmware 2 days ago when I was checking for firmware updates. I believe I have hardware version 1.0, but not sure how to verify that.

I asked TPLink for the 1.2.8 file so I could fail back to it if needed. They just sent me to the Download Center which doesn't look like it has 1.2.8 yet. I'll ask again. 

My network has still been much more stable. Cameras are much more responsive than on 1.2.7. I'd really like to get others on the newer firmware to help test the conflicts with enabling Guest or IOT networks. I'm afraid of changing something that will cause everything to go unstable again so I'm hesitant to do anything else at this point.

  @xjsimon Can you take a look on the bottom of one of your nodes and see what version it is? Are you running the beta app?

I have v1.6 hardware and still not seeing this.

  @Holocron 

Looks like I have the 1.6 hardware as well. I'm still on 1.2.9 beta but it became unstable today for my cameras... I had to reboot the network but didn't make any changes at all. Oddly this time, half my 2.4 cameras are still pretty responsive and some are disconnecting and slow to respond.

Here's the link to 1.2.8 if you want to try it.

https://static.tp-link.com/upload/firmware/2023/202309/20230925/Deco_XE75_V1_1.2.8_20230901.zip

Quick update. My network completely crashed last night. That coincides with the schedule reboot that was enabled, so not sure if that was the cause or just a trigger. In any case, I had some Deco units that had to be manually reset - which is a big pain for my setup. I was starting to get hope because the network was stabilizing again last night.

So, I think I'm going to switch back down to the 1.2.8 version and do some further testing on it (I was only on it for a day before TPLink sent me 1.2.9 Beta to test with).