Google’s Nest Wifi and Google Wifi routers make mesh setups easy and, for the most part, pretty reliable while being relatively cheap. However, over the past few months, some Nest Wifi and Google Wifi owners are reporting that their networks have been going offline at random for months, and it seems Google has no concrete fix.
First reported all the way back in September, one Nest Wifi owner took to Google’s forums expressing frustration with their network randomly going offline. In the months since, the post has received over 200 replies from other Google/Nest Wifi owners seeing similar behavior.
Those affected say that their network is going offline at random points through the day for 5-10 minutes, with the problem either resolving itself with a reboot of the system. Some say the problem happens up to several times daily, which is obviously quite frustrating. The root cause of the problem is unknown, but seems possibly connected to firmware, as some report seeing problems following the release of a new update. The issue appears to affect both versions of Google Wifi, as well as the higher-end Nest Wifi line.
As far as we can see within this thread and responses from a “Community Specialist,” Google has not yet identified a fix for this problem, but some owners have been able to get hardware replacements, though that didn’t always fix the problem.
We’ve reached out to Google regarding this ongoing issue, but the company was not immediately available for comment.
9to5Google’s Take
Personally speaking, I’ve encountered this exact issue without realizing it. What I attributed to poor service from my local ISP (Spectrum) and/or a faulty modem, turned out to be this same problem. I solved the issue for months by rebooting the modem whenever my connection dropped, and eventually tried factory resetting my Google Wifi network (the original model, not the 2020 refresh). Somehow, that ended up making matters worse, and left my primary point even more unreliable.
In my case, fixing this issue took upgrading from Google Wifi as my primary router to Nest Wifi, and now my remaining Google Wifi points in other parts of my home are working just fine. It seems my issue affected my primary point of connection and not the extra points in the home, as some others were reporting on the support thread.
As someone who dealt with this issue for a couple of months while working from home, it’s something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and I sincerely hope that Google pushes a fix out as soon as possible.
More on Google Nest:
- Google Home 2.43 adds Wi-Fi ‘device speed test’ & preps ‘ISP access preference’ for Nest Wifi
- Apple Music for Google Nest, Home is now available in Canada & 4 more countries
- Nest Hub Max may soon run Fuchsia as Google ramps up internal testing
Author: Ben Schoon
Source: 9TO5Google
