Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Chrysalis]

I just checked my Zyxel and it seems the default DHCP range is from .2 to .254 so almost a full /24.

I wonder if you just have a buggy firmware on there or something.  Bear in mind also when a device disconnects the IP will effectively be reserved for as long as the lease time value.  So you would ultimately need more IP's than devices unless you using DHCP preservation across the board.

[sevenlayermuddle]

I just checked my Zyxel and it seems the default DHCP range is from .2 to .254 so almost a full /24.

I wonder if you just have a buggy firmware on there or something.  Bear in mind also when a device disconnects the IP will effectively be reserved for as long as the lease time value.  So you would ultimately need more IP's than devices unless you using DHCP preservation across the board.

Good, back on topic.

I believe the limitation is on the number connected WiFi clients, rather than DHCP clients.

[kitz]

I believe the limitation is on the number connected WiFi clients, rather than DHCP clients.

Correct.   It appears to be a hardware limitation of the wireless chipset - despite the GUI displaying options up to 32.
It's not specific to the VMG8324 and other routers are also likely to be affected.   

[broadstairs]

Having been watching these discussions I am now wondering if my BT Whole Home WiFi 3 disc system has a similar issue? Note I have not experienced any issues even when the grandkids are here with their Dad and 3 extra phones. I'd be really upset if it did have these issues. It is crazy in my view for home devices to have these issues as more people are using multiple wifi devices in their homes. Suppliers need to wake up and resolve this, it cannot be difficult to fix but yes maybe they need to throw a few bucks at it and come up with more capable routers etc.

Stuart

[Alex Atkin UK]

Having been watching these discussions I am now wondering if my BT Whole Home WiFi 3 disc system has a similar issue? Note I have not experienced any issues even when the grandkids are here with their Dad and 3 extra phones. I'd be really upset if it did have these issues. It is crazy in my view for home devices to have these issues as more people are using multiple wifi devices in their homes. Suppliers need to wake up and resolve this, it cannot be difficult to fix but yes maybe they need to throw a few bucks at it and come up with more capable routers etc.

Stuart

This is nothing new, when there are routers supporting WiFi 5 that only have 100Mbit ethernet and even the Home Hub 5A that has a WiFi chip capable of hitting full WiFi 5 speeds, but an SoC that utterly chokes if you try.

This is what happens when nobody wants to pay for their router and exactly why £300 routers exist, with hardware that CAN handle it.  (although somehow they still often manage to mess up the software on those)

[Chrysalis]

pfSense and OPNSense are poor at wireless (mainly due to underlying FreeBSD), so I think the best for wifi AP's is perhaps getting something with good hardware "and" is compatible with openwrt.  Since I started using openwrt for wifi I havent had anymore issues on wireless.

The problem I have with vendor firmware's is they typically done with lowest cost in mind and support often ends not long after the unit is sold, since they seem to cycle products very regularly.

There is also the deliberate separation of enterprise and home, so it wouldnt surprise me if a 32 device limit was there for that reason.  Its the reason we seeing 2.5gbit ports instead of 10gbit ports.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Actually there are a few other reasons for 2.5Gbit ports, not least that I suspect SoCs are lagging behind in their integrated support.

Realtek make a cheap chip for that so if you can spare a PCIe lane, then you have one.  N-BASE-T switches are still pricey though, thus why you still only get Gigabit LAN ports.

Another important factor is 10Gbit runs hot as it uses a TON of power, neither good things for a router.  I could cook my dinner on the Netgear GS110MX and it only has two 10Gbit ports.

[niemand]

I imagine some of it is maintaining compatibility with existing cabling. 2.5 G works with Cat 5e. 5 G works with Cat 6. Cat 6a or equivalent performance is the recommendation for 10 G.

That and the main driver for 2.5 G - access points being bottlenecked by Gigabit Ethernet.

[PhilipD]

Hi Kitz

Sounds like you might need to move to more "pro" gear.   Using consumer grade kit only gets you so far.

If you can then running an Ethernet cable up into the loft and installing a ceiling mounted access point would not only improve range to all devices, but also get you something more professional.  Power over Ethernet makes installing something like this much simpler now as you don't need to get power up there, just an Ethernet cable, then inject power into the cable elsewhere.

Use the ZyXel as a modem only and get yourself something like the Netgate SG-1100 for routing, this little thing consumes around 3 watts and is pretty powerful and runs pfSense, it will beat any consumer type router for performance and reliability.  You will also need some sort of switch to give you some more Ethernet ports but these can be had cheap enough and also are well optimised now and draw little power.

This will give you something much more pro-consumer/SOHO and easily cope with FTTP faster speeds in the future.  We are all only going to need more devices connected in the future.

Regards

Phil

[benji09]

  I had an odd fault on my Netgear ADSL router a fews years ago. I started having some of the WiFi settings going missing after I had repeatedly put them back in again. So I assumed that my router was running out of memory. Since I had a huge number of devices in the Access Control list, I decided to delete ALL Access Control settings, and the problem went away......

[displaced]

The original problem description sounds awfully like ARP table exhaustion.

We ran into this at my previous job where we used a load of consumer-grade access points for temporary field use.  We could get about 26 devices running before this sort of oddness crept in.  Eventually we got a D-Link engineer to confirm the ARP limitation.

There was nothing in the router's settings or status pages to suggest a limitation - for example, DHCP would happily offer a full /24's range of addresses no problem.  It'd just freak out when >26 were in use at once.  This sorta makes sense -- there's nothing intrinsic to the WiFi, Ethernet or DHCP implementation that has a limit -- the device simply can't keep more than a few dozen IP-to-MAC entries in RAM at once in order to route between them.

This is one of the many reasons I chose to keep my modem, router, switch and AP duties in separate lumps of hardware. 

[edit: I just did a cursory search for VMG8324 and ARP.  Looks like the ARP table can at least be viewed via the web interface.  Might be worth counting the entries and seeing if you get an 'interesting' number - a power-of-two, or power-of-two-1, or a round decimal number.  Also see if the table's missing a device that you're struggling to reach after it's randomly lost connectivity]

[edit2: I see ARP's already been discussed and discounted(?) - never mind me!]