Ring devices Wireless connection

I have been investigating my wireless network and I found out all my Ring devices are connecting to the very first wireless access point and STAY LIKE THIS without re-connecting/roaming to the strongest signal. For example:

My access point downstairs has been rebooted due to firmware upgrade. My doorbell switched to the access point upstairs and it just stayed connected to the access point with WEAKER signal for over TWO WEEKS. What’s worse, in the similar situation, the doorbell did the same but connected to the even much weaker 5G signal upstairs (-72 signal!!!) and stayed this way for four days until I realised it’s draining battery and not recording any videos. Much better (-50 to -55 signal) access point was still available downstairs and all our home devices (phones, laptops, even Google devices) just switched to the better internet, I assumed it’s normal.

I have analysed my Unifi connection logs and there is NO sign of Ring clients switching (roaming) the wireless network. If you reboot the doorbell, then it’s just randomly chooses to connect to whatever access point based on unknown criteria and that’s it. 2.4G/5G, strong, weak or no signal - Ring device doesn’t care!

I have the same experience with all Ring devices - doorbell and cameras. Doorbell is the worst because of the poor radio it’s been equipped with, cameras are better, especially wired, because at least they are not draining battery but one battery powered cam is also discharging much faster when connected to the access point which is further - when it has the best access point available just near it!

As a workaround:

  • I needed to create dedicated 2.4G only network for Ring devices (why did I pay for ‘better’ Doorbell 3 with 5G then?)

  • I need to monitor my network and check if my access point downstairs has not been rebooted recently, because of my doorbell! That’s an absurd!

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19/10 update:

  1. I needed to use MAC filtering and force the Doorbell to stay on desired Access Point, I also have dedicated 2.4GHz band and dedicated Wi-Fi network for the Ring devices, mainly the Doorbell 3. Ask yourself a question - do you have skills to do such things? If yes, there is a chance you will connect this device to the network and get quite reliable connection. If not, you still might be lucky and your doorbell will connect to SOME Wi-Fi you have, ideally you’ll have one hub/router/point so the doorbell will have no choice but still, remember about 2.4GHz / 5GHz band and this doorbell is terrible with 5GHz connection.
  2. Thinking about Chime Pro? Think again, it will be hit and miss, your doorbell has no intelligence, it might connect to your Wi-Fi in the shed or to the hub downstairs even if it has a choice to be connected to your brand new Chime Pro (which is a repeater…) one meter away from your door. There is NO WAY you can force this doorbell to work with your Chime Pro except using advanced Wi-Fi features, not available to regular users.
  3. Now I had some time to test motion detections. It’s set to about 50% sensitivity, People Only Mode, frequent detection (because otherwise I missed real incidents). It’s now detecting clouds moving, shades, shadows and porch lights on/off. It’s detecting my cats. It’s notifying for People Only which is good but unnecessary motion detections are draining battery which is now 14-21 days on average which is not great.
  4. I will move out in few weeks, so the fun begins again!

I am not happy with my Doorbell 3, I feel I could buy just Doorbell 2nd generation, save a lot of money, and got the same device. The same video quality, the same features, 5GHz is unusable anyway unless you have the AP 50cm away from the door frame - I feel robbed to be honest. Terrible value for money.

1 Like

I agree that the expensive Ring Doorbell should manage its own connection properly.

You have Unify equipment… in this case its like 2 minutes work to solve the issue using the Unify side of things.

And personally I never let my Unify/Edge devices update firmware automatically. I like to be in control of what happens and when it happens :smiley:

I can confirm this exact same behavior with the Floodlight Cam on an enterprise class Cisco 2.4 GHz network using a 9800 controller and 1832i AP’s, where several Access Points are transmitting the same SSID on different channels (1,6,11). After hours of troubleshooting, packet captures, and log file analysis – it can be concluded that the ring device caches the MAC address of the first AP it connects to for the SSID, and it assumes that will always be the same MAC address even if another AP has a stronger signal.

Whenever the APs go offline, if the first AP to reboot isn’t the same one Ring expects…the device refuses to join the SSID. It will be deauthenticted and give a message to the user that the password is incorrect. Once in that mode, it will not join the SSID.

The workaround I found is to set up a hot spot on your phone and re establish connectivity. Then, and only, you tell the device to join another network. In my case I had to set up a separate SSID for the one AP closest to the cam…and only broadcast it on that one AP. At this point the ring device is happy, since it doesn’t see more than one BSSID/MAC address.

This is likely a bug, where device roaming was not properly tested or understood, or it is some type of weird “feature” to prevent using Ring devices on controller based WLANs. (Device roaming is common expected behavior in wireless networks today…) I’m going with a bug, as other competing devices seem to roam seamlessly from AP to AP.

I’ve spoken to Ring’s higher level expert support about this and they have said they’ll get back to me with more details.

This was never resolved, although one higher level support person said that roaming was not supported on the Ring Floodlight Cam. Roaming support is a basic feature that should be supported in pretty much any hardware manufactured of late — this is not an exotic or enterprise class feature, it is part of today’s Wi-Fi chipset / stack.

Ultimately this looks like a severe bug in the wireless firmware for the Ring Floodlight Camera that renders it unreliable for wireless networks that have more than one access point (not extender).

I fixed the issue by changing brands and going with another Wi-Fi enabled floodlight. Zero problems for month after month.