Some not all devices disconnected

[#1]

It wouldn't be Christmas Day without an internet issue :). Hope you all had a good day.

I've had a BTHub6 for a long time having followed the steps posted by @Baldrick1 sometime back. I was used to changing routers frequently before I got it. Aside from one occasion when my username and password got wiped the BTHub has been a marvel.

My problem now is that I've now had 2 recent times (yesterday and about a week ago) when most of my devices across both 2.4 and 5GHz will drop out. Everything here is wireless but a small number of devices remain on the internet; the hub has a blue LED shining so it looks like it stays online too. One is definitely my music server running on a Raspberry Pi. It has a static IP address like a few other devices - I strongly suspect those are the few that stay on the network but I haven't confirmed that. The DHCP assignment is currently the prime suspect.

A restart of the router solves the problem but I It looks like the root cause is still going to cause me issues so I need to figure out my best plan.

I have a couple of devices that I know will be fussy moving to a "new" router so I want to make sure that I don't make too much extra work for myself here. 

Can you give me some advice please?

1. I'm thinking a factory reset of the router might be the way to go but is there something less drastic to sort out the IP table that I could try first -  if that is the issue?
   
   
2. May be i should forget DHCP and give everything a static address other than for guests.
   
   
3. Is the BTHub6 still my best bet?. I have a new boxed Hub2 from PN unopened. Might that be a better bet for all round performance and reliability. I remember having some issues that required splitting the bands and from what I read here that's not an option on the Hub2 though there are work arounds.

I'm not on FTTP being in a rural East Anglia * that might take a while to arrive here. I have FTTC 40/10 which is fine for me. Main usage is for the usual range of internet connected things include an IP Camera, streaming of Video and (crucially) Audio. No gaming or port forwarding requirements or that sort of thing.

Thanks

[#2]

@the_groundsman 

Are all your static IP addresses in the reserved static range of  192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.63? Are you sure that you do not have two devices trying to use the same device?

If you go into the advanced wireless settings and use the always use this IP address tab you can fix the address used by each dynamic device.

[#3]

Hi Thanks for looking

The ones that say static  are in the regular address range 192.168.1.64 to 253

I had a problem with a couple of devices which needed to stay the same but sometimes got allocated different addresses.

• With my RPi music server, there was another device on the network that acted as a wireless extender; when my music server tried to connect it sometimes picked up the extender and was issued a different IP address. With that I moved the setting so Always use this IP address was set to yes but since i figured out the root cause I changed that to "no", and turned off the extender. It still shows as Static
  
  
• I have an Chromecast alarm clock that was dropping the connection a lot so I changed that to static
  
  
• I have a google nest mini  and a smart plug that I havent interferred with but they are still showing as static; I havent said i want it to use the same address so don't know why that is.
  
  So I don't really have a need to fix IP addresses but those historical changes to the settings seem to have have persisted. The IP address part of this issue might be a red herring anyway.
  
  I'm tending to think step one will be a factory reset of the SmartHub6 as its been so good for me and I assume that the PNHub2 is probably going to be a downgrade

[#4 · Accepted solution]

@the_groundsman 

The only downside of the newer Plusnet. Hub 2 is that you can’t split the bands. However, the upside is that you can set your own choice of DNS resolvers, you can set them to Bridge mode and they self configure. WiFi performance is the same.

[#5]

Thanks a lot.

If/When this happens again, I'll try the factory reset of the Hub6 first then try the Hub2.

Appreciate your input