Linksys Velop WiFI 6 APs not working with Apple Homekit

[talksr]

Hi guys.

If anyone can help with this, I would be really grateful.

 

I recently did a post re home mesh wifi. During the Amazon Day deals, the Velop Wifi 6 APs came up. I went for them as I had some vouchers to use at Amazon. After some hassle getting the pair to talk to eachother due to having a managed switch, they now talk – I needed them to talk via ethernet as my new build has ethernet in each room and they couldn’t; talk via wifi due to range issues.

 

Anyway, it works like a dream, however…Apple Homekit is now refusing to work.

I contacted Linksys and they told me the APs do not support Apple Homekit Secure Router.

I did some looking into this and this is not what I want.

I currently have an iPad mini which is the Homekit “hub”. Faiiling this, I have two Apple TVs which are the standby devices.

 

What I have found is that since switching to Velop APs, all devices (and there are many) in Homekit just show as “Not Responding”. It doesn’t matter what I do, they never come online. Through LightWave, Hue etc, everything works fine, Alexa fine also. So clearly, there is not a connectivity issue here.

 

There is 100% an issue with the Velop system.

If I plug one of my old Apple Airport APs back onto the switch and give it a different SSID, if I unremember my Velop SSID from the Homekit hub iPad, and add the Apple Airport SSID, it works immediately. All other iOS devices are connected to the Velop system, but so long as the Homekit hub iPad is on a non-Velop AP, Homekit works perfectly. Why the fuuuuuuu is this? I can’t understand what Velop is blocking. The app they give you to use is very basic, and I can see nothing in there to help.

 

These APs seem really good so I don’t really want to send them back, but I have invested a fortune in Homekit enabled smart accessories so I need it working. I would have loved to have got some Unify APs as many suggested in my last post, but they were not included in the Amazon deal 

[Davit2005]

Is there some sort of client to client block going on with the Velop??

 

Have you thought about jus using the Velop in non-mesh then using with your managed switch if possible as a test.

 

Interesting what you say though, I know it is not much comfort but I have recently swapped out Unifi WiFi at home with some Cisco Small Business in walls (probably rebranded Linksys, lol) and now everything works apart from my Garmin smart scales which simply do not connect to the WiFi, need to troubleshoot that when I get some spare time. I'm going to investigate my issue with Wireshark eventually.