I have had an HP printer for about 6 years - never had any issues with this model. About 6 months ago, the printer would always be "offline" and I would need to reboot it for it to be recognized across wifi network and print.

I put the printer on a fixed IP address - 192.168.1.144, and when I ping it from my Macbook, it is unreachable until I reboot the printer. I stay reachable for about an hour or so then becomes unreachable again, and therefore unable to print.

I do not have any strange home network setup - never have and this only started a couple of months ago. I have your standard Spectrum equipment and before that gets bashed I have been in this house for 13 years and have never had any issues and two of us work from home on video calls all day long...the service has been fine.

any thoughts? Printer is an HP OfficeJet 4650

I have updated firmware, dropped and re-added printer to my macbook, so everything is
"up to date".

Other devices in the house see the same issues - windows laptops, iphones, other macs

Maybe create a batch file to ping the printer once a minute?

:loop
ping 192.168.1.144 -n 1
timeout /t 60
goto loop

Have you updated your WiFi infrastructure recently?

I usually find that most IoT or older equipment will work more consistently if relegated to ONLY accessing a 2.4GHz band wireless connection and not dual or via 5GHz.

Your best bet would be to create a separate WiFi network for all of your connected devices that forces them to use the 2.4 band and only put devices (like laptops/tvs/etc.) that NEED the higher band/faster speed.

Just throwing out ideas that you can try.

this will have no effect. I set my terminal on my macbook to ping, at it does it every 1 second...after 2200 attempts (~30 mins) it times out again.

The timing of the timeout is interesting - its like a DHCP thing releasing IPs or something, but that even doesn't make sense since I have manually assigned my printer an IP addr. I hate networking and not 100% savvy in it, but this is just what I see happening

the printer is showing connectivity at 2.4GHz...so are you saying the issue is - even if the printer can ONLY funciton 2.4GHz, the fact that the router supports both might be a problem? I sued to have a router that had separate SSIDs: 2.4 and 5, but the one I have now is one SSID and supports both...wondering if the timing of when I got that is when all this started.

also, the spectrum app that manages the devices on the network show it registered with 192.168.1.144, its just other devices on the network cannot get to it until I reboot it

CapCity12thMan said:

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this will have no effect. I set my terminal on my macbook to ping, at it does it every 1 second...after 2200 attempts (~30 mins) it times out again.

The timing of the timeout is interesting - its like a DHCP thing releasing IPs or something, but that even doesn't make sense since I have manually assigned my printer an IP addr. I hate networking and not 100% savvy in it, but this is just what I see happening

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Does it routinely go offline after a precise number of minutes? That feels like a 'feature'.

i've been trying to time it to see...

here is what the specturm tech told me to do and I cannot believe this is a suggestion:

I appreciate your patience, I was able to test the ping / check the readings and everything looks great

Packets:Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss)

Lets try this to troubleshoot the router: Can we please disconnect the ethernet cord from the back of the router and modem, swap the ends and reconnect it? Once this is complete, please unplug only the router for about a minute and then plug it back in

CapCity12thMan said:

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the printer is showing connectivity at 2.4GHz...so are you saying the issue is - even if the printer can ONLY funciton 2.4GHz, the fact that the router supports both might be a problem? I sued to have a router that had separate SSIDs: 2.4 and 5, but the one I have now is one SSID and supports both...wondering if the timing of when I got that is when all this started.

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Easy thing to try is just turn off the 5GHz part of your wifi and see if things stabilize. If so, then you can worry about segregating bands as a next step.

Not guaranteeing anything, but it's something to try. And yes, even if your equipment only supports 2.4GHz, there are optimization settings in the shared 2.4/5GHz that can cause anomalies.

update - since rebooting, ping from my macbook has maintained connectivity. Not sure why a router reboot would have helped but it seemed to have worked.

Maybe reset the registered IP addresses? Maybe another device was also being handed the same IP as your printer, and every time that device tries to connect, you start getting an IP conflict with your printer?