If you have an "internet of things" peripheral that has stopped working, see if you have a setting for your router that forces the router to use both the 5 Ghz band and the 2.4 Ghz band, and if you do have that setting, use it.
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If you have an "internet of things" peripheral that has stopped working, see if you have a setting for your router that forces the router to use both the 5 Ghz band and the 2.4 Ghz band, and if you do have that setting, use it.
We have an excellent Brother printer. It uses toner, not ink. It prints quickly and legibly. It was easy to set up and until now, was minimal effort to maintain.
We use it mainly to print character sheets for our Pathfinder 2 game, music for my sax, and homework assignments/aids for our son. Also sometimes when we think we'll need a printed ticket (like the local theater where we saw the musical, Annie).
It stopped working. I mean, it stopped printing over wifi. We could print to it if we carried the computer over there and plugged it in, but that is not very convenient.
I'd been doing a lot of troubleshooting (for more than a week) and nothing was working. We were getting to the point where we were considering getting a new printer for Christmas. Nothing was working. The printer could "see" the network, but it could not connect.
And finally I thought, "I need to make sure that our router, which has worked beautifully up until this point, is still operating on both the 5 Ghz and the 2.4 Ghz bands." Because this printer only works on 2.4 Ghz. The router is supposed to do this, and it HAD up until this problem surfaced. But I thought maybe this was another avenue to try.
And what I found, upon attempting to check whether both bands were active, is that there was no good way to do that. They don't want me to be able to check this.
The online help all told me that the router was smart enough to know when to use which band. But nothing told me how to check if the 2.4 Ghz band was operating currently.
Our router came from our internet provider, so that's where I went next. I had to convince the internet provider's chatbot to connect me with a person, and their solution was to force the router to use two bands. Which worked.
I feel like mentioning that I had already discovered this setting in their app, and their app told me NOT to split the bands. It deliberately directed me away from the solution to my problem.
Anyway, once we did that, the printer could once again connect to wifi, and everything else is still happily on the 5 Ghz band.
SO! If you have a peripheral that uses the old 2.4 Ghz band, and it has suddenly stopped connecting, see if there is a setting force your wifi to do both bands. Because I suspect an update went out that caused ours to stop intelligently using both.
I'm very happy to have fixed this, but I'm also frustrated because it was harder than it needed to be. We nearly bought a new printer because we were beginning to think the wifi in the printer just wasn't working any longer! And the part of me that is strongly influenced by Cory Doctorow thinks that perhaps this update was done on purpose as part of the ongoing enshittification of everything.
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If you have an "internet of things" peripheral that has stopped working, see if you have a setting for your router that forces the router to use both the 5 Ghz band and the 2.4 Ghz band, and if you do have that setting, use it.
We have an excellent Brother printer. It uses toner, not ink. It prints quickly and legibly. It was easy to set up and until now, was minimal effort to maintain.
We use it mainly to print character sheets for our Pathfinder 2 game, music for my sax, and homework assignments/aids for our son. Also sometimes when we think we'll need a printed ticket (like the local theater where we saw the musical, Annie).
It stopped working. I mean, it stopped printing over wifi. We could print to it if we carried the computer over there and plugged it in, but that is not very convenient.
I'd been doing a lot of troubleshooting (for more than a week) and nothing was working. We were getting to the point where we were considering getting a new printer for Christmas. Nothing was working. The printer could "see" the network, but it could not connect.
And finally I thought, "I need to make sure that our router, which has worked beautifully up until this point, is still operating on both the 5 Ghz and the 2.4 Ghz bands." Because this printer only works on 2.4 Ghz. The router is supposed to do this, and it HAD up until this problem surfaced. But I thought maybe this was another avenue to try.
And what I found, upon attempting to check whether both bands were active, is that there was no good way to do that. They don't want me to be able to check this.
The online help all told me that the router was smart enough to know when to use which band. But nothing told me how to check if the 2.4 Ghz band was operating currently.
Our router came from our internet provider, so that's where I went next. I had to convince the internet provider's chatbot to connect me with a person, and their solution was to force the router to use two bands. Which worked.
I feel like mentioning that I had already discovered this setting in their app, and their app told me NOT to split the bands. It deliberately directed me away from the solution to my problem.
Anyway, once we did that, the printer could once again connect to wifi, and everything else is still happily on the 5 Ghz band.
SO! If you have a peripheral that uses the old 2.4 Ghz band, and it has suddenly stopped connecting, see if there is a setting force your wifi to do both bands. Because I suspect an update went out that caused ours to stop intelligently using both.
I'm very happy to have fixed this, but I'm also frustrated because it was harder than it needed to be. We nearly bought a new printer because we were beginning to think the wifi in the printer just wasn't working any longer! And the part of me that is strongly influenced by Cory Doctorow thinks that perhaps this update was done on purpose as part of the ongoing enshittification of everything.
@AngelaPreston My router shows up twice with slightly different names for the two bands, so I can directly see whether they are both on by simply opening the search panel to connect to wifi on my laptop or phone. If yours does this too, it would make it easy to check next time.
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@AngelaPreston My router shows up twice with slightly different names for the two bands, so I can directly see whether they are both on by simply opening the search panel to connect to wifi on my laptop or phone. If yours does this too, it would make it easy to check next time.
@hosford42 It does now that I changed the settings. Prior to this, the router used one name and was supposed to operate both bands. And it did that, for however long we've had this router (years?). Until recently.
Now we have a forced split and uniquely named networks on each band, so I can see it.
It's still weird to me that their app tells you NOT to do it this way.
