WBE660S Constantly Losing Uplink via Mesh

ViciousXUSMC

I have had three WBE660S since release.

1900sqft home two of them have 10gb ethernet uplinks, but the 3rd is in my garage where I do not have ethernet available.

I use the wireless uplink (mesh) feature for this one and it worked absolutely fine for well over a year. I would say for about 6 months or so this device goes offline constantly.

It still broadcast its radio so my devices connect to it, but no uplink so my smart home devices get completely messed up thinking they are on the network without access.

A full power cycle results in a very long blinking orange/green and perhaps it connects, and perhaps it does not. Once connected it has a very strong signal back to the next closest AP.

But despite this, it keeps randomly going offline again for no reason, it seems like its only getting worse and worse.

I am not sure if this is hardware failure, or something introduced by a firmware update.

All 3 AP's are up to date with the latest.

It is now so bad that I have had to permanently disconnect it and force everything to connect to the other 2 AP's and that is less than ideal for both signal strength and the number of devices.

I am starting a support request, but in my years of working I.T. I often find community resources to be better/faster so I figured I would stop in and share and see if anyone else has had issue or knows of a potential resolution.

Zyxel_Tina

Hi @ViciousXUSMC,

Welcome to the Zyxel Community!

Regarding the issue you're encountering, could you please enable Zyxel Support Access so we can investigate further?

ViciousXUSMC

Will do Tina.

Enabling that now.

I am in office and that AP is currently unpowered to prevent problems but hopefully you can pull the historic logs and see what issues might be in there.

I made one change just now, I went ahead and enabled manual uplink to force it to the closest AP. While it has never failed to connect to the correct AP and there is a strong signal between them. As it seems to have issues making that initial connection, I figured this might be worth a try.

I have a support case (#562230) as well but so far I must be with the entry level support so they have not done any investigative work and only made generic recommendations.

So once I get this connected again, it should sync and pull the new setting for the fixed uplink.

ViciousXUSMC

Oh and P.S. as a fellow Network Engineer if I can make a recommendation.

The biggest issue can be prevented by forcing the AP to not accept client connections until it has established an uplink.

That is what is causing network interruptions and I think should be something simple to impliment via firmware.

Zyxel_Tina

Hi @ViciousXUSMC,

Thank you for your feedback!

We noticed that your APs are not using the latest firmware, which addresses a bug related to the smart mesh feature. Therefore, we suggest upgrading your devices to the latest firmware first to see if the issue persists.