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Printer issues with new Smart Hub

AR99
Investigator
Investigator

I recently upgraded to fibre optic with EE’s new smart hub router. All home devices connected to the router (laptops, tablets, mobile phone and printers) work fully. Except that the two HP Envy Printers will only work for a few hours before print jobs fail. When the router is rebooted, all is well again, but only for a few hours. Wireless and Printer configuration reports are all OK. Wireless connection does not drop. Signal strength 100%.

The router channels are separated into 2.4GHz and 5GHz and the printers connect successfully to the 2.4GHz band. One printer is set up with a Windows 10 laptop, and the other with a Windows 7 laptop.

BT tested the line at the cabinet and in the home and all is OK. EE replaced the initial router in case it was faulty.

Have tried HP options below but they do not fix the issue:

  1. Set printer to a static IP address including an option outside of the dynamic range of the hub
  2. Set printer to use an automatic (DHCP) assigned IP address
  3. Set router option to “try always to use this (printer’s) IP address”
  4. Updated printer software and drivers
  5. Can anyone help please?
7 REPLIES 7
Northerner
Grand Master
Grand Master

Hi @AR99 

 

This seems to be an issue with your printers. Have you tried the HP support community?

 

Thanks




To contact EE Customer Services dial 150 From your EE mobile or 0800 956 6000 from any other phone. You can call Freephone +44 800 079 8586 on Skype

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Hi Northerner

I have contacted HP support directly who suggested the solutions tried but unsuccessful. I will take a look at the HP support community as you suggest to see if that yields anything. No problems with the printers prior to the change of router though.

Thanks

Christopher_G
EE Community Support Team

Hi @AR99

 

Welcome to the community. 🙂

 

It sounds like an unusual one. As the issue is only happening with two HP products, you may find your answer from their forum.

 

Let us know what you find out, it may help someone else here in future.

 

Chris 

Hi Chris

HP community forums have not yielded a solution. All potential HP related solutions have been tried by me but nothing changes. Printers have never been a problem until the broadband line was installed with the new Smart Hub. Printers work 100% for a number of hours but then the router has to be rebooted to continue any wireless printing. When printing fails the connection between the router and printers still appears to be all OK as do the test reports.

Can anybody help please before I escalate further with EE?

Thanks

Jon_K
Former EE Employee

Thanks @AR99.

 

I'd recommend getting back in touch with our Tech Care team.

 

Between our Tech team and HP, a solution should be possible.

 

Jon

IT-4BusyPeople
Established Contributor
Established Contributor

Printers disconnecting/disappearing from the network seems to be quite a common problem, I get this with my Brother printer and the EE Brightbox 2, although not as frequently as you report.

 

Fundamentally, there are two problems:

1. The maintenance of network address lookup tables

2. The locating of the printer through discovery services such as Bonjour/Airprint and that use both IPv6 and IPv4.

 

Basically to mitigate the network issues you need to:

1. Connection: Use a fixed LAN cable to connect your printer to the router and turn off the printer's WiFi so that your devices can only connect to it via your network.

2. Printer: Assign a static IPv4(*1) and IPv6 address and ensure it also has a unique host name.

3. Router: Add an IPv4 address reservation rule that includes both the static IPv4 address and the unique host name.

I've left the DHCPv6 setting as stateless and UPnP enabled. 

 

(*1) What isn't clear from the EE documentation is whether the address reservations are inside or outside of the DHCP address pool; convention says they should be outside, so I've assigned an address outside of the DHCP pool.

 

One other thing I've found is that both Android phones and Apple phones/ipads can be quite slow in transferring data to the printer, so I've frequently encountered the situation where the printer is 'locked' as it is waiting on an ipad, but because the user has switched to another app, the ipad isn't going to complete the transmission. 


@IT-4BusyPeople wrote:

(*1) What isn't clear from the EE documentation is whether the address reservations are inside or outside of the DHCP address pool; convention says they should be outside, so I've assigned an address outside of the DHCP pool.



It's not stated cuz there is no restriction. For the BrightBox 2 address reservations can be within or outside the DHCP range. As can they be for the EE SH but it is sometimes difficult effecting this.

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