Losing 2.4Mhz Signal While 5Mhz is Fine - IP Changing by a 3am Reset Recently - Admin Turning Off 2.4 Radio

Hey, IP address assignment is usually dynamic, changes all the time. As far as "Admin" changing modes that may be OS initiated.

 What logs are telling you this information? Please post in order to better understand. 

 Alternatively, if you can, switch to 5Mhz WIFI and see what happens.

 Just my .2 cents.

 Thanks and good luck.

@user_ca854f 

FWIW, the overnight hours are their typical window of opportunity for performing network maintenance / upgrades / firmware pushes. Your WAN IP will typically get changed when they do this. You can reset to factory defaults all you want but the new firmware will just be pushed over and over again. They are now combining the two WiFi bands into one single band and making some of the other WiFi settings unadjustable by the end-user. 

Hi,

i understand all you say about change of IP should be expected and likely.  What I do not understand is ‘why’ my 2.4MHz-portion of the signal is being shut-off and locked OFF u til a hard factory reset.  I run one SID name split by two transmitters each sending out a 2.4 and a 5.  

it was not doing this at any time before the last four nights.  

It's a new / different firmware load that has feature changes. I'll repost this part again;

"firmware pushes. You can reset to factory defaults all you want but the new firmware will just be pushed over and over again. They are now combining the two WiFi bands into one single band and making some of the other WiFi settings unadjustable by the end-user."

O/k. I'm going to escalate the issue to the Comcast corporate employees that are available to these boards. Perhaps they will be able to clarify things / better advise. You should get a reply here in your topic. Good luck !

I don't have a solution, but the same thing started happening to me recently. I have an older Amazon Echo that only works on 2.4 Ghz and two or three days this week, I had to re-set up the wifi connection that it lost overnight. But last night (Jan 28) it did not have this problem, so it's plausible they were pushing some kind of update for a few nights.

I am using the single SSID for both 2.4 and 5 Ghz.

I am experiencing exactly the same behavior over the past 4 days. Using the "Restore wi-fi settings" option in Troubleshooting section usually solves the problem, until the night comes. I am considering leaving the Gateway disconnected overnight to prevent updates.

I worked on WiFi technologies at chipset level, and I used a network analyzer to investigate this issue as I have the same problem as well.  In a nutshell, I see multiple questionable 2.4GHz behaviors that looks like protocol violations on top of routing issues.  I am stunned Comcast released a product like this to the mass.  Ironically, a $24.99 Chinese router is more compliant with IEEE standards.  I've split the 2.4GHz and 5GHz SSID to reduce handoff issues.  Almost all issues are on 2.4GHz.

1) Comcast seem to reset the modem router every night between 3-4am.  Modem logs indicate the reset command was received.  This happens every night without fail and nearly at the same time, it suggests this is a systematic doing by Comcast.  I suspect they know the WiFi bugs or other FW issues and use the reset to conceal the bugs. This will surely cause all devices to go offline for a few minutes and increase odds of some devices may not reconnect correctly, especially when there is a possibility the router can't handle a surge of requests to connect.

2) All the 2.4GHz issues complained by people are correct and real.  The 2.4GHz band can suddenly stop sending beacon, which makes it appear offline.  However, some 2.4GHz-connected devices can remain connected and can still pass traffic.  But those that were disconnected can't reconnect, until such moment the beacon start to transmit again.

3) DHCP lease expiration and renewal process seems buggy as well.  Comcast set the lease to expire at 2 days but when time is up, it doesn't send lease expired message, so a lot of devices will stay connected on the same IP address assuming the lease is renewed with the same IP.

4) The routing table/function is messed up for 2.4GHz.  While the PHY/MAC connection on the 2.4GHz seems to be good, the router refuse to route traffic.  While this is happening, traffic on 5GHz still flows just fine.  If your 2.4GHz device is pretty smart, it may drop connection and try to reconnect but then get stuck with issue 2) above.

5) Transmit powers for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz are very weak.  I think Comcast did this on purpose to reduce RF interference when the modem router is deployed in high-density situations like apartments.

6) Issue 5) above causes 5GHz to appear problematic, but when in fact 5GHz behavior seems correct and all traffic I observed seems to be compliant with known protocols.  5GHz doesn't propagate well and when I observe 5GHz issues, they are almost always related to RF interference or degradation.  On fringe area devices, sometimes an slight device orientation adjustment can overcome or improve on this issue.

7) Very unreliably beamformer technology, especially when you have a device connected via WiFi near the modem router which require the radio to transmit at lower power.  The radio doesn't seem to be able to ramp up power very quickly.  The power and directional adjustments needed to adapt to each device (nearby and farther away) seem very unoptimized, which will further compound the issue and likely cause a lot of speed and connection fluctuations at each device.

I can say with reasonably good confidence that these lousy modem routers are causing a lot of avoidable connectivity issues people are seeing with their devices.  I haven't seen a 2.4GHz this bad behaving for a long long time.