@Danspiral 

Most Residential routers cap you at 32 devices per band. Dual band router, 64.

However, this TP-LINK page might be of interest to you and explain more, https://community.tp-link.com/en/home/stories/detail/1302

Commercial products can handle more devices though.

@IrvSp Thank you for that link. Id already read it and found that it does not answer my question. The article seems to ignoree the fact that 95% of smart home devices use vanishingly small bandwidth and only sporadically.

So I'm not interested in general information. i am asking if this router specifically is refusing new devices by not giving out new ip addresses or by some other method. im not experiencing slow service or any other such problem. im finding that new devices are simply not connecting to the wifi network at all.  i expanded the dhcp ip address pool to 255 but that has had no effect. 

if this cannot be worked around this big fancy router is a brick to me. 

I can find nothing in the manual about a limit or how to lift is but did find a forum that said tplink stuff comes with a device cap (at 50) you can lift in administrative settings. i cannot find that option in my settings. 

I should add that ive become fairly adept at trouble shooting my device connections until suddenly now. ive also had a few devices "fall off" the network and seem unable to get back on.  The router reports 49 or 50 local devices depending on when you look. 

@Danspiral 

First, you CAN have 253 devices 'capable' of connecting to a router, 192.168.0.2 to .254. What you have to understand that the router can only handle X per band. My tri-band should handle 96, but due to performance issues, the actual 'usable' number of CONNECTIONS will be less.

Think about it, there are a few things that determine this:

• The capability of the router to manage those device addresses (part of the buffer size in the firmware).
• The capability of the router CPU and Chipsets to handle traffic IF all devices want 'service' at the same time (think 'streaming' or video security systems).
• The actual TCP/IP traffic and how many devices are active at the same time.

It could also be 'collisions', that is more than one device has a STATIC IP address that is part of the DHCP pool. When it turns on, it will knock off the device that was given that IP Address. Using RESERVED IP Addresses by MAC address in the Reserved pool is a better way to do that for specific IP Addresses to a device.

Suspect when you get a device knocked off, it was idle and the new device that replaced it was not idle, and neither were other devices connected.

Another possibility is getting another router as an Access Point. Put some devices on it. However, I'm not sure if this would work, never tried it? I've seen reports on the web it doubles the band limit, and others that say it does not? In any even, everything goes through the main router, and you'll not gain speed.

Might want to look at Enterprise routers?

@IrvSp 

thank you for responding with what you know. i may try to setup my devices with static addresses starting at 001 and working up. .that sounds like it might make things more stable.  . am i understanding right, though that there may be a " band limit " regardless and you don't know what it is in this specific case? 

Im hoping someone knows about this specific router. th ac5400 . . my devices are (almost) all 2.4ghz smart home wifi devices. Ive basically done my entire house's switches and am now running into this limit. id love to learn the details about how this limit works. I may need to change things over to zwave or some such. Im hopimg i can just change a setting in the router. . . again speed is not an issue at all in this case. 

@Danspiral 

Danspiral wrote

@IrvSp 

i may try to setup my devices with static addresses starting at 001 and working up.

You can NOT do that. The Router itself is at .001.

You can however set the IP Address pool to say 192.168.0.100 to 192.168.0.200 for instance. That allows you to set IP Address by device from 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.99.

Using Reserved IP Address on the router which use MAC Addresses is I think a better way to do. The router will ensure there is no IP Address collision that way (usually). Using Static, that is set on the device, you might set 2 to be the same IP Address. The help for doing this:

Basically, you allow the device to connect using DHCP... than find it in the list and copy the MAC address. Then do an ADD and paste in the MAC Address, enter the other data too, the IP Address you want it to be at, and the description. Do this for each device.

Every time they connect that WILL get the same IP Address that way.

@IrvSp 

thanks for the info. to clarify, is there any possibility this can increase the 50 limit? if not i need a different solution regardless. 

@Danspiral 

I am not an employee of TP-Link, nor have any knowledge such a setting. All I was trying to do is explain it.

I've never seen such settings in 'residential' routers. Limits are not set arbitrarily usually.but do to either h/w or s/w restrictions.

You might find some that do have higher capability, or even ones that use 3rd party f/w that has that feature. Don't know.

Some reading for you, Huawei will work for you, https://consumer.huawei.com/en/support/content/en-us00755678/

However, I'd think you'd be looking for a MESH system, https://www.techadvisor.com/feature/network-wifi/how-many-devices-connect-router-3801105/

TP-Link's info on Mesh, https://www.tp-link.com/us/mesh-wifi/

Netgear 'says' 32 per band, https://kb.netgear.com/24043/How-many-clients-can-you-connect-wirelessly-to-a-NETGEAR-router, but at that amount, TCP/IP could be slow depending on how many devices are active.

@IrvSp 

spent an hour and a half waiting for tp link support to look up an answer to this. they said "32 per band har limit no way to lift limit". Wild. I guess smart home wifi switches were just not on their radar when they made it. Anyway. . . the 32 limit isn't even true, at least its not the whole story. i know because im looking right at a list of clients connected and its 50, 45 of which are on the 2.4 band so . . . anyway they wont give me back my money so Im selling this thing on ebay and trying a google nest wifi which advertises it connects 100+ devices. . . we'll see. . . Its completely insane that this infoemation is vague in the marketing and manuals. i get its a  complex and potentially confusing issue but a hard limit is a hard limit. . . its a simple number.

Also plenty of complex and confusing numbers are advertised about products all the time (litres in engines. . . all food products).

They must think nobody cares about device limits. . .and maybe they don't yet. . . but they will soon.