Can't connect Ring camera to wi-fi? Try this

Requirements: A device that you can use as a hotspot. I recommend reading through first before just going through the steps. Background I upgraded my router recently. After I did, despite all of the Ring tech support and router tech support trying to help me get my cameras online, I couldn’t get past the 95% where the connection fails (2 stick ups, a doorbell, and floodlight). I know all of the tech support and resolutions steps by now like the back of my hand, and NONE worked. Of course, I could still connect to a hotspot on my phone. Solution What worked for me, and I’m hoping a few others with this problem can test, is utilizing my Wi-Fi hotspot as an avenue for connecting to my home router. If anybody having this problem could test this and report the results, I’m curious to see if it works for you. Steps are as follows and are for an iPhone, although I’m sure you could do something similar with Android, I just don’t have one to explain how to configure. I suggest trying this before you go to bed, because while it worked, it didn’t work right away. Steps Make sure you can connect your wifi cam to your phone’s internet hotspot. Try setting up your camera with your hotspot and if it succeeds, move on to the other steps. If it can’t, this process has no chance of working for you (well it could, but that’s a different write up). If you have an iPhone for your hotspot, make sure you toggle the maximum compatibility option prior to trying to connect the camera. Make sure your home network has a 2.4 Ghz network broadcasting. Do not use smart connect features on your router. This is a feature that may be in your router that allows you to use one network name for both 2.4 and 5Ghz bands . You want to have your 2.4 and 5Ghz networks with separate SSIDs (Network names, as an example “Network 1” for 2.4 and “Network 2” for 5Ghz. I know ring says to create a guest network dedicated to the cameras but I didn’t find this necessary. Next take note of the exact spelling of your 2.4GHz network name and password and make sure there are no special characters in the password. Special characters are anything that aren’t numbers or letters. Now turn off your router. Not reboot, but pull the plug or turn off the switch if it has one. On the iPhone, go to Settings App → General → About, and then press on Name at the top. Change the name of your iPhone to your home router’s 2.4GHz network name. Hard Reset your camera (hold the reset button for 20-30 seconds and wait a minute after for it to initialize). Go back to the main page of the iPhone settings app and select Personal Hotspot. Change your password to the password of your home network 2.4GHz network. Toggle on Maximize Compatibility, and then toggle on Allow Others to Join at the top. Your hotspot should now be running and configured with the identical network name and password of your home router. Admittedly I used an iPad to setup my ring cameras and dedicated my iPhone to simply being the hotspot. I’d be curious to know if anyone can set one up with just the phone. I didn’t try. Set up the Ring camera as normal. It should connect to your hotspot. After it’s connected, and you can verify that you can use live view for the camera in the app with your hotspot, wait about another minute and then turn off your hotspot. Turn your router back on and let it boot up as normal. The Ring camera should be in the process of trying to reconnect to the hotspot but it isn’t there. Now your home router is available with the same network name and password. Wait and wait some more. I found that when I did this my doorbell and cameras connected within a couple of minutes to about 20, however, I could not see any video nor did many features work. After about 15 minutes for the doorbell I could use it as normal. After about 90 minutes the floodlight cam worked as it should. After about 3 hours both stick up cams joined the party. Summary I don’t know why this works for me. I don’t know why it takes so long after a successful connection for everything to work as it should, nor why it’s faster for one type of camera vs the other. If you are impatient like me, I’d try this an hour or so before bed so that you can let the cameras do whatever they do in the background to start to work by the time you wake up in the morning. Request for Input Please let me know if you tried this and if it worked for you. Please also let me know if you made any deviations to get it to work. I’m trying to create a tutorial thread to connect/reconnect cameras that fail on connecting to Wi-Fi after following Ring’s typical troubleshooting steps.