Alcatel 4GEE Router using 5Ghz wifi crashes router repeatedly

[Guiseppi]

Hello.

As title says, enabling 5Ghz wifi crashes router, often requiring a hard reset (power off / on) to get it working again, sometimes just the wifi restarts cutting off all connections.

I actually have two 4GEE routers, used thru various different firmware versions, and both exhibit the same behaviour, so it may be some external device's 5Ghz quirks that is causing the crash that shouldn't happen regardless 😉

I've been operating happily with a workaround for a long time now, by using 2.4Ghz only it is very stable, but would like to make use of the faster 5Ghz.

Any known solutions?

Cheers.

[jamesmacwhite]

Hi,

Sounds like a certain 5GHz device might be triggering something strange with the radio driver or causing a kernel panic. Do you have multiple 5GHz devices to test to see if it's isolated to a certain device?

It is going to be hard to know what exactly is happening, because telnet/SSH access is disabled by default. You ideally would need this to get more clues as to what exactly is happening with logs.

Have you tried playing around with the channel setting on the 5GHz radio?

[Guiseppi]

I have tried many things, including channel changes.

The only two devices it could possibly be that have 5Ghz are a fire HD 10 tablet or the main laptop I use (Sony with Intel WiFi link adaptor) I also have 2 Samsung phones in the house with 5Ghz capabilities.

The last thing I'm trying right now, is to switch from 5 Ghz 802.11A/C to 802.11A/N only, tho that reduces optimum performance possibilities. I never actually tried that in all this time!

[jamesmacwhite]

It would be interesting if dropping it to N rather than AC makes a difference. You might want to try and connect any 5GHz capable wireless device one by one and see if any specific device triggers the behaviour you described.

The 4GEE Home Router runs a very old version of OpenWrt (14.07 barrier breaker). I wonder if one more devices are causing the radio driver to crash or a driver is throwing a kernel panic causing it to lock up.

[Guiseppi]

Well.

Dropping to 5Ghz 802.11a/n seems to stop it crashing (so far, it may well do so again), but is another workaround from using full A/C.

[Guiseppi · Accepted solution]

That's no crashes since my last post.

Seems like disabling 802.11a/c allows use of the 5Ghz band in my particular case.

Oh well...

[jamesmacwhite]

Thanks for reporting back, that's strange that one or more of your devices causes the 5GHz radio to crash when set to 802.11ac, but glad you've found a workaround.