The Nest Wifi + Mesh review week 5ish (yikes)
This is week five in my running Nest Wifi + Mesh review. Over the past couple of days I’ve noticed my Nest cams were offline, then online, and my Midea air conditioner would be alternately reachable and not. Last night my Cielo Breez claimed it was not reachable, and unplugging and plugging it back in fixed it. Couple of smart bulbs also were complaining but oddly turning them off and on again seemed to re-establish them on the network.
TL;DR – 4th installment, it’s demonstrably unreliable on my network
The Nest Wifi isn’t
This morning sometime between 7 and 9am the internet at my house went out. This was the second time the Nest Wifi + Mesh had gone down in five weeks. This time I had a little more mental acuity and went to my computer to see what was the matter.
I attempted to ping the unit at the 198.168.86.1 address it assigned itself and my pings were not returned. This was new and interesting. I checked what Wi-Fi networks were available, and it was not showing. The unit was dead, but had a light on. Unreachable via Wi-Fi or wired.
I went to the main fiber modem, verified it was up and running fine. I only did this because I’d received an email at one point about a device on the ethernet malfunctioning (the Nest Wifi I’m assuming,) and wanted to verify there was no issue with the port the Nest Wifi was plugged into. There wasn’t. There was no way to control the unit that I could find.
Unplugged it, plugged it back in, worked fine.
This is not good. My house’s rudimentary security via Nest cams was down for hours. My wired network was down (last time I believe wired worked but wireless had died,) and overall this becomes something I can not trust to operate if I am not at the house. Twice in five weeks.
For the moment I am going to plug the Nest Wifi into a smart plug that will exist on a Wi-Fi that the fiber modem can monitor. This was I can turn it off and on again. Had I not recommissioned my Portal WiFi, I would be switching back to it. It ran for years (at my house,) with only one unexplained disconnect. The Nest Wifi has run for about 5 weeks and has two network downing events.
This being a Google product, I have no idea whether these lockups are hardware, software, post-software update issues, or what because the logging is just not there for the end user.
I like the performance of the unit, but it’s not handling my 70 or so devices very well.
Other Nest Wifi reviews in this series
The Home test
Day 1 – initial impressions
Week 1 – the first lockup
Week 3 – the thing operated ok
Week 5 – Yikes, it’s so unreliable I’m going to replace it
Week 6 – Playing with Family Safety / restricted while trying to fix the thing
Week 6+ – all the lockups I’ve had with the unit
Week 7 – after a suggestion from a reader lockups appear to have resolved – yeah, no, they didn’t 15 hours later
Week 7 – have removed the unit from my network and purchased a different brand router because it just wasn’t stable
After giving up, the corporate test
Day 1 – initial impressions in commercial world (day 55)
Day 7 – locks up with next to no usage, no devices connected (day 62) – this one contains a possible retraction
Sometime after day 7 – soapbox, I am on it.
Day 21 – Mesh unit disappears, two reboots later it’s back (day 83)
Day 30 or so, giving up
Related to the product line
The Nest Wifi Pro having issues – how utterly shocking
Product links: Amazon, Google Nest Store
