Second 5Ghz Radio disabled on BGW 320-500 & 320-505?!

Thanks for the updates. It really does seem like you might have a local issue. Have you checked your 110v outlets to make sure that they are all grounded?

Might also be time for an electrician to check your main power panel. Do you have 100 amp service or 200 amp to your main circuit breaker panel?

Next up could be interference from a Ham station near by. Do any of your neighbors have any large antenna arrays up?

Dave

The outlets which aren't grounded cannot easily be grounded due to design of home and location of them. Most of our outlets on our home are grounded, only a few are not. We only have seven which are not grounded. i've moved the power strip provided by ATT which they plugged into another power strip which is plugged into a grounded outlet of which is properly grounded. We had wiring in most of house upgraded to code. When we moved into this one (it was a HUD Repo) Original homeowners were in the midst of a remodel when they passed, and the two residents before us didnt make any changes as they only lived here a short time) When we got here, we discovered it had Knob and tube wiring still. Entire backroom and other parts of house were upgraded to code. the remaining ungrounded outlets like I said cannot be easily re grounded.

We had an electrician here just before covid hit to install a light in our carport, run power to our dry pond, fix the broken wire providing power to our shed, run power to a vent fan under our house, etc. They checked main panel, fuse box, Secondary panel,  (yes parts of the house are controlled by fuses.)  


As for service being 100 or 200 amp, I have no idea. We have the standard thingy that I call the shoe or wire club attached to conduit running down to the electric meter, then out of there to our breaker panel.

The only thing that even resembles that I am aware of would be at the fire department up the road, and then the community center down the road from the community center. I live within line of sight of the nearest cell tower.
As in I can see it from my two bedrooms in the back, my den, and my driveway, backyard, roof, etc.

Edit: Some devices wont connect. Such as a google pixel three, a windows 10 laptop, a kindle. google home's, amazon echo, etc.

Thanks for the discussion everyone. I'm experiencing the same issue: one of the 5G band SSIDs disappeared since this morning. There is no option to have two separate 5Ghz SSIDs anymore. I suspect a firmware change happened last night / in the last couple of days. It's really frustrating to wake up to a broken home network on Monday morning.

I just did a factory reset and it's still behaving the same way, i.e. only one SSID for 5Ghz despite the BGW320 being a tri-band router with 2 separate 5-ghz radios.

It looks the hardware is not defective, but rather a firmware bug / regression happened recently. It seems the two 5Ghz bands are force merged into one. After I reconnect the few dozens devices to the "merged" 5Ghz band, a few of them are connected to "5 GHz Radio-2". Also the "Current Radio Channel" for 5Ghz does show 2 separate channels (40 and 100). So it looks both the high and low band are active, but the firmware is not allowing us to configure them properly / give separate SSIDs.

This change is a really bad move, especially if it's intentional (e.g. trying to force band steering for the two 5-ghz bands). At least give us the option to manage it explicitly so we can control the bands and devices. Tri band routers are certainly very useful, but not with the forced and merged bands.

Is there a channel to report this firmware bug / regression?

Is there a channel to report this firmware bug / regression?

No and AT&T never indicated that you would be able to manage each 5 GHz radio individually. It just happened to be an available feature once you dug into the UI of the BGW320.

@forzawq how were you using the 2 distinct 5 GHz radios? I really don't see a use case where that granularity is a real benefit. Do you also hard code individual channels on your devices?

For reference it would help if you post your Firmware level and the specific model of the BGW320 you have -500 or -505.

Dave

Woo-hoo.  Good to know im not the only one experiencing this. But I'm sorry that you are also experiencing this one. What version are you running? and which manufacturer is yours from? Is it a HUMAX or NOKIA ?

I wonder if they are switching one of the 5g radios to a mesh backhaul channel. Or possibly a dedicated WiFi channel for wireless stb’s and doing away with the WAP?

@dave006 thanks for the quick response.The device model is Bgw320-505. With Current software version: 2.9.10

Yes I was using two separate 5Ghz SSIDs. Apparently one of the SSID simply got killed, in this firmware change I suspected. This isn't really an okay way to upgrade software - - my nest security cameras door bell and two baby cameras all went offline because of this.

As for the use case, it's basically why we have tri band routers. Like mentioned above the extra band can be used as a wireless backhaul or dedicated wifi 6 band. I used the high band as a AX-only channel and a wireless backhaul to connect to another wifi-6 AP to utilize 160 MHz channel. But currently with this change, there is no way for me to achieve it anymore.

I understand AT&T might not put the explicitly band management as a guarantee, but having it and then killing one of the SSIDs is really not the proper way to do software. My wife was upset this morning when finding both of our baby cameras were down. Plus, the support for separating low and high 5G bands was there, why not keep it as an option at least? 

If thats the case, they're copying off XFINITY, at the rate they're going they might as well use RDK (reference design kit)

PLEASE DON'T DO THE ABOVE.

I really hate Reference design kit, It's slow, bloated, proprietary, etc.
But seriously I really liked how it was originally. Is there a way for consumers to have read-only access to the firmware pages?

for example these routers run on Linux basically. They use Linux kernel 2.6 or 3.6.. and again is a unneeded change,

Additionally there should be a way for the extenders to be recognizable as an extender when they broadcast the network SSID, and give us more management options in the firmware and GUI of it.

The gateway GUI really needs some work, things don't always fit on pages, the log only displays firewall logs and things like that, nothing related to the system.

Im with you @forzawq , They really don't need to be changing things willy nilly and messing with the SSIDs. I know that att doesn't like it when consumers disable band steering. But I'd prefer that ATT not disable things, and at this point it wasnt  att. It was whoever wrote the update and didnt test it and check it for bugs. So basically its the technical Team's fault.

No and AT&T never indicated that you would be able to manage each 5 GHz radio individually. It just happened to be an available feature once you dug into the UI of the BGW320.

The technicians did, It just seems pointless that AT&T did this, basically killing the seperate SSID. The functionality of the equipment is now reduced as devices keep not wanting to connect and they claim the password is incorrect when it is entered directly as it is on the gateway.

Reducing functionality is essentially a crap move, or as I say a Comcast move. Why give the functionality and then take it away? That's like giving a dog a bone, and then immediately the next day taking it away and getting rid of it.


Not trying to be hostile here, but its not correct of att to do this. Especially when agents over the phone and online say that we should be able to do that. Meaning having all three networks separated with different names.