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Forum Discussion
R6400v2 too many smart home devices?
We recently added a bunch of smart home switches and lightbulbs to our home. That is on top of all the amazon devices and smart TVs, etc. Since we finished adding in the switches, the router will seem to crash and will disconnect everything. Eventually after resetting it a couple times, it will come back up. I'm thinking maybe we are overwhelming it with all the devices. Is that a thing?
We have around 40 smart devices between switches and bulbs that all need to run on the 2.4 band. Do I need to get another router to run a network just for those smarthome devices and so that it will keep my regular network open for our phones, computers and smart tvs?
Thoughts?
3 Replies
Most consumer routers from netgear support up to 32 devices per band.
You might see if some of them support 5ghz and move them to 5ghz.
https://kb.netgear.com/24043/How-many-clients-can-you-connect-wirelessly-to-a-NETGEAR-router
Sadly, all of the light bulbs and switches specify that they need to be on 2.4. So I would likely need to get an additional router and create a secondary network that would open up an additional 32 devices in the 2.4 band, right? Since they will be exclusively these switches that don't take a lot of bandwidth, would I be ok getting a less expensive router for those? And keeping the streaming devices on my existing router?
You might even have an older 2.4ghz router sitting around you can put in AP mode.
but you shouldn't need anything fancy.
Or you can look at upgrading your primary router and using it for the IoT devices.
Up to you :)
