AXE5400 in a Mixed Wired and Wireless network
I am at the end of my patience with this new AXE5400 device. There are so many unexplained issues with wired and wireless devices. Let me first say that I'm not a network expert, but have had to learn more than I cared to just to try to make this system work as poorly as it is:
Here is the setup:
The house is wired with Cat 6E cabling in many rooms all connected to a 16 Port unmanaged TP-Link Switch
The Internet at present is Starlink. The Starlink Router is is running in Bypass Mode.
The Starlink Router is in the Bedroom and plugged directly into the Bedroom AXE device
I'm using two of the AXE5400s, one in the Bedroom, one in the Living Room. This gives me good WiFi signal around the house.
All devices are on one big flat network.
Many of the devices in my house are wireless with the exception of a few streaming devices and my Internet Radio Station's two Windows PCs. Those are wired and connected to the 16 port switch.
The first issues I noticed was that listeners to my station were complaining about the station staring and stopping and them needing to constantly restart the station. I starting to ping between Windows PCs and the ping times are terrible. Anywhere between 2 & 10 ms. So, to keep my listeners happy, I moved one of the PCs out of the studio and into the Bedroom where it is plugged directly into the AXE5400 in there. This has resolved most of the listeners issues but I still have all the network issues in the house. If I do a Ping -t from either PC to the default gateway 192.168.0.1 (The AXE) it will time out every so often. If I ping the IP of one Windows PC to the other PC, the latency is between 2-10ms.
Then something happened that really surprised me. I had to move a cabinet in my living room so I unplugged the power of everything in there, including the Living Room AXE device, and my Studio PC suddenly lost access to everything! It remained that way until I plugged it back in. So obviously these devices share routing responsibilities with each other and it causes intermittant disconnects with all the devices. For exammple, if I try to listen to my station on the Alexa device in my living room, it will play for a while but will eventually stop and I'll need to restart it again, same issue my listeners reported. It comes in waves. It will be good for maybe an hour, then it will stop every 20 or 30 seconds for 10 minutes,
My network isn't overly congested. We are two people living here with a few computers, Alexa devices, iPhones, and some smart home devices.
I am out of ideas on how to solve this, and am quite sorry I bought them frankly. I've got an Archer AX6000 router that I'm considering to replace these devices, and maybe trying to use these as Access Points ONLY? I don't know if that will help, but I'm otherwise out of ideas. This is a pretty simple network set up, and I've never had these issues before when I had my old Google Mesh system.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
