I’ve had some fun experiences with my BQ16 Pro (set of two) recently.
In general, they have been working relatively well but occasionally my Apple devices seem to lose Internet access. It seems like a DNS issue with the lookups not going through and just hanging. A quick disabling of WiFi on the devices and then re-enabling it will fix the issue until it occurs again. They seem to do this fairly randomly, sometimes requiring reconnection after a couple of hours and sometimes after a couple of days. I have the router set up as the DNS server with it configured to pull from the Cloudflare DNS servers. If I continue to see this issue, I’m going to set the devices to go directly to the Cloudflare DNS servers to see if that fixes things.
On another note, I have a little Internet-enabled clock that quit connecting to the WiFi network when I upgraded to the BQ16s. So, I got the idea to setup the Guest IoT network to see what would happen. Little did I know that I would be heading down a rabbit hole. I first set up the Guest IoT network with the defaults, using the same subnet as the main router and selected just the 2.4 GHz network. I pressed Apply and voila, the Guest IoT network was brought online. I tried connecting my iPhone to the Guest IoT network and it refused to multiple times but with much persistence I eventually got on the network. However, once I was on the 2.4 GHz network, I had no Internet access. I couldn’t even ping the router and get a response. After thinking about this for a while, I thought that perhaps it’s something to do with my subnet as I use a 172.16.x.x subnet for a bit of extra security (most would assume the network would be on 192.168.x.x), so I deleted the IoT network and recreated it allowing it to set up another subnet for the network which wound up being a 192.168.x.x subnet. Once I set it up this way, things began to improve. I could ping other devices on the IoT network reliably but pinging the router or Internet addresses was hit or miss with about 60% of the packets getting lost.
So, back to the drawing board I went. I deleted the IoT network again and added it back using its own subnet and this time I set it up to be on both the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. That seemed to do the trick. Now I could reliably connect to the network, could reliably ping other devices on the IoT network and suddenly the Internet access and pinging the router started working as they should. I contacted ASUS support and opened a ticket with them and provided logs of what was going on and gave them a full description of my experiences. It’ll be interesting to see if they come back with anything. It would be nice if they could resolve the subnet issue so that I could have one cohesive IoT and regular network, but I’m not holding my breath. At least the clock is connecting and working again.
There was a new firmware update out in the last day or two that I just installed. It’ll be interesting to see if it stabilizes things further.