For your apple devices, change the band width in the WIFI settings if available. See https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-kindly-fix-your-wi-fi-on-ios/ for more info.

@ArcherC8 

ArcherC8 wrote

For your apple devices, change the band width in the WIFI settings if available. See https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-kindly-fix-your-wi-fi-on-ios/ for more info.

 

This article is 6 years old; the iPhones in question have Wi-Fi 6. There is no setting to change Wifi bandwidth in iOS that I'm aware of.

 

Not completely ruling out that there is some issue with iOS not playing nice with this router, but I don't have this issue with the same devices on other networks (including many hours at the office on that network), and I didn't have the issue at home either with my previous Netgear router. I would also think that TP-Link would do extensive testing with iOS devices considering how ubiquitous they are.

The WIFI band width change would be in the router's WIFI settings for each band. You may need to turn HomeCare off to get to those settings. Some devices prefer a narrow band and other devices a wide band. Each band width has it good and bad points and both are in spec. My TP-Link router does not have an issue with my Apple products except once in a while one of the iPads has a problem in the far reaches of the house and another iPad right next to it has no issue both on the same network.

@Eab6287 

 

Do you still have smart connect enabled? If so, try disabling it.

 

Regarding the WAN you could try swapping the Ethernet cable out. If you happen to still have your old router are you able to install that and leave it for as long as the AX router was when the issue of dropping started?

@Tony I tried disabling SmartConnect and am now using separate 2.4ghz and 5ghz SSIDs (manually connecting the 5ghz-capable devices to that band). For whatever reason, the 5ghz band seems to be the one causing all of the trouble (e.g. still seeing various devices giving the 'unable to connect to [SSID]' error on the 5ghz network but not the 2.4ghz network. In the course of changing many of the devices to manually connect to the separate 5ghz SSID, I noticed now that it is no longer only Apple devices having an issue, but also for example a Samsung SmartTV (try to connect to 5ghz SSID with correct password, seeing a ' connection failed' error. 

 

In an attempt to address this, I tried switching the authentication mode to 'WPA/WPA2' w/ AES (rather than the originally-selected / default WPA2/WPA3'), thinking that maybe something to do with using the WPA2/3 setting was not playing nice with the non-WPA3-capable devices. This seemed to have something to do with the issue, because my Samsung TV then successfully connected right away.

 

However, I am still seeing periodic issues with Apple devices (iPad, AppleTV) refusing to connect to the 5ghz SSID with the 'unable to connect' error.

 

Tony wrote

@Eab6287 

 

Do you still have smart connect enabled? If so, try disabling it.

 

Regarding the WAN you could try swapping the Ethernet cable out. If you happen to still have your old router are you able to install that and leave it for as long as the AX router was when the issue of dropping started?

The WAN issue hasn't happened in a few days so just crossing my fingers on that one for the moment.

 

 

Any other ideas? I really am starting to wonder honestly if I somehow got a lemon / bad hardware on this router unless others are having the same issue. I just have never had so many issues with basic functionality with a router before.

@Eab6287 

 

If the issues persist I would follow up with support right away.

@Tony I have the same issue. I believe it has to do with the private address option on Apple. But I think it has to do with how the router assigns IP addresses. 
 

if you leave your network (forget) and rejoin it grabs a different IP address. 
 

I think that, the phone stores an IP it wants even in an automatic setting. I leave the house x amount of hours, a smart device powers online and grabs that IP then when I come home, the phone tries to grab the same Address and can't.