Indoor Cam support failing to help

Since Ring support is unable to help, I am hoping that some resourceful neighbor may have some brilliant idea before I go ahead and ask for a (partial) refund for my useless camera.

Let me summarize the situation briefly: I purchased 4 cameras for my lab at the beginning of the pandemic, and spread them around the lab, 2 of them being served by a dedicated NetGear WIFI router and the other 2 by another identical router.

Things worked fine for the first 6 months or so, but lately one of the camera dropped off the network. I tried to reconnect it with my Android Ring phone app and failed, so contacted support.

After failing in all the basic attempts to reconnect the camera with the help of support tier 1, I was forwarded to suport tier 2 (Ring Solution Adviser or RSA). This failed too, despite me rebooting the router, trying to connect the camera to the other router, etc.

It was concluded that the network card of the camera might be defective and therefore I was sent a replacement camera.

Tried to set it up this morning and failed. Contacted support, which walked me through the basics, to no avail. The guy even hanged up on me or at least never contacted me back after the connection was lost, so I had to call back and ended up with someone who of course decided to walk me through the basics again. I stopped that right there and asked to talk with a tier 2 support person. Wasn’t easy, but I got someone who basically admitted after some information exchange that they had no clue and this had to be a “network” problem.

Obviously… but how is that helping?

The odd thing is that after the camera fails to connect to the WIFI network, my router sees it as connected, and so does it the old camera, which is plugged in and stuck at its failed connection attempt.

Both cameras have their own local IP address as seen on the NighHawk Android app I am using to check which devices are connected to it, so they apparently managed to connect to the router. They just can’t figure out how to reach the internet from there, which one of the cameras had no issue for 6 months, and one camera is still doing without a problem.

Frustrating, but maybe someone has managed to get out of this hole with a trick?