Having your printer continual to fall off WiFi is the worst. Whenever you actually want to print something, lo-and-behold, you can’t, and you need to spend 2-20 mins fiddling with it to get it back on the network. While all mine took was a printer restart for it to magically reconnect to wifi, this is always how I felt.
After enough frustration, I finally took some time to sit down and fix the problem. After a bit of searching, I stumbled upon this Brother article (granted I’m printing from a Windows PC and my specific printer is a Brother MFC-L2750DW). That at least gave me some hope, as I was using a single SSID for both 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz – you know, like a sane person.
With the above article in hand, I created a new SSID that was only on the 2.4Ghz with the following settings (Unifi Controller 7.0.23):
New UI:
- Broadcasting APs: I have it set to just the 1 where closest to the printer
- WiFi Band: 2.4Ghz
- WiFi Type: Standard
- Multicast Management:
- Multicast Enhancement: ▢
- Multicast and Broadcast Control: ▢
- Client Device Isolation: ▢
- Proxy ARP: ▢
- BSS Transition: ▢
- UAPSD: ▢
- Fast Roaming: ▢
- 802.11 DTIM Period: Auto
- Minimum Data Rate Control: Auto
- Security Protocol: WPA2
- PMF: Optional
- Group Rekey Interval: ▣ 3600 seconds
- Hide WiFi Name: ▣
Legacy UI:
- Security: WPA Personal
- WiFi Band: 2.4Ghz
- WPA3: ▢
- Guest Policy: ▢
- Broadcasting APs: I have it set to just the 1 where closest to the printer
- Multicast and Broadcast Filtering: ▢
- Fast Roaming: ▢
- Hide SSID: ▣
- Group Rekey Interval: GTK rekeying every 3600 seconds
- UAPSD: ▢
- Multicast Enhancement: ▢
- RADIU DAS/DAC (CoA): ▢
- Beacon Country: ▢
- BSS Transition: ▢
- TDLS Prohibit: ▢
- Point to Point: ▢
- P2P Cross Connect: ▢
- Proxy ARP: ▢
- L2 Isolation: ▢
- Legacy Support: ▢
- PMF: Optional
- WPA Mode: WPA2 Only
- DTIM Mode: Use Default Values
- 2G Data Rate Control: ▣
- 6Mbps
- Disable CCK Rates: ▢
- Also require clients to use rates at or above the specified value: ▢
- Send beacons at 1Mbps: ▢
The printer has been online for over 20 days, whereas before it would fall off the network sometimes before it even fell asleep. 🎉🎉
Hopefully this helps someone else out there.