Arlo Pro 4 & Wired Doorbell Won’t Connect w/ Tri-band Mesh Wi-Fi

[Wrateman]

I have five Arlo Pro 4s and the Arlo wired doorbell, that were all working fine (without a base station) on a two-band router that had a different SSID for the 2.4G band; I upgraded the network yesterday to the Linksys MX8503 Atlas Max 6E Mesh Wi-Fi System (2.4G, 5G, 6G.) I have currently configured it so all 3 bands use the same SSID/password.

I have been unable to reconnect my doorbell and two of the five cameras. For the doorbell, I do the factory reset, get the blinking white lights, but never get the chime. For the cameras, I get the blue blinking light, and I do get the chime. But for the doorbell and both cameras, they don’t find the devices, the app times out.

I’ve been researching this here and in general (Google, Reddit), and several articles suggest isolating the 2.4G band, which I will try today. Most of the articles here are a few years old, and I can’t see the KB links in the historic responses. 

Other than this, any other suggestions before I do the 2.4G rename? Do you think I can keep the same SSID for the 2.4G but a different password? Would that make sense?

Or, should I delete all the devices and do a ‘fresh install’, on the existing network first, w/ the same SSID name for all three bands?

TIA…

[Wrateman]

Note, I also tried reconnecting the devices after I turned off the 5G and 6G bands, just had the 2.4G band broadcasting…fail. 

[jguerdat · Accepted solution]

Much simpler to just reuse the old SSID and password for the new router so the cameras just connect as if nothing happened. Too late now.

WHat encryption is being used? Arlo needs WPA2 (AES).

[Wrateman]

Currently it's configured to WPA2/WPA3 Mixed Personal...change to just WPA2 Personal?

[jguerdat]

Supposedly the mixed encryption should work but try the WPA2 one.

[Wrateman]

I'll try that, thanks. 

I will try using the old name/pwd, there are still 3 cameras that I haven't reset, so maybe that will work for them. 🤞

[Wrateman]

So, I reconfigured the 2.4G with the old SSID name, and I made sure my mobile was on the same...

3 times, fail. It would chime, but then the device couldn't be found. 

So I did the nuclear option and removed the device, it worked the first time! Note that because I killed the old SSID all the devices were showing disconnected. 

I will give it a go w/ the other cameras and the doorbell in a little while. 

UPDATE: Since I started typing this note and successfully added the device above, 2 of the devices that were previously showing disconnected are now showing active/reconnected to the old SSID (I had not reset these yesterday), so I'm going to hold off for a little while. The one that I did reset is still showing 'Connected to | Offline.'

[Wrateman]

Update: all fixed, however, I'm updating the nuances here for future reference.

1. Two of the cameras updated themselves (as mentioned above) without any intervention from me, after I changed the 2.4G SSID to the old one.

2. The other cameras had to be removed and then re-installed; I waited 3-4 hours without any luck. 

3. For the front doorbell, I had to remove the power and then re-connect. Even then, I had to manually reset it (instead of just ringing the bell per the instructions (app).) I had tried 6-8 times without success (simply holding the reset button in, per the app instructions.) The 'pain' w/ re-installing the doorbell was that I had to wade through all the installation screens (I couldn't see any easy way to skip all that) so I could get to the QRC screen. 

I then removed the 2.4G network from my phone, so that it only finds the 'weaker' 5G/6G bands.