@Jony_temperance not a new problem, see https://community.tp-link.com/en/home/forum/topic/619928

  @raven-au  Thank you!  A reset of all access points made my network more stable.  Meant having to set up the entire network again - twice!!!  Headache and fried my weekend, but seems much better now.  The app still seems emotional at best though. 

  @Jony_temperance . I have to take back my last message.  I am seeing a ton of instability in the network as I try to use it for web conferencing.  The slave AP's show up then down.  I've rebooted this network multiple times.  This whole network is unusable at this point.  Will continue to try to trouble shoot the multiple issues I am seeing, but NETWORK IS VERY UNSTABLE and UNUSABLE.

It seems as though the *.bin firmware update has made the problem worse throughout the day and network is disconnecting devices more frequently. Things seem to be getting worse vs better

  @Jony_temperance .  Last thursday night, I spent 3 hours with an engineer in china who was unable to resolve the problem.  The call started at 9pm ET because of the timezone difference with China and didn't end til midnight because the engineer had to go to lunch (not because the problem was resolved).  It was clear the engineer didn't understand the issue and the problem continued on Friday, so I am throwing in the towel and returning the system.  For a brand new system, it shouldn't take this amount of effort and what really upset me is that the TP-link really care.  The support engineer simply said he was going to lunch and ended the support session when I had stayed up specifically to get this support session given the time difference with China.  Given the issues with the technology and poor support, I have no choice but to return it.

On saturday, I bought a Netgear Orbi, which is fantastic.  It works great and would recommend to anyone dealing with these types of issues with TP-link. This orbi is EXTREMELY stable and lightening fast and I am now a netgear convert.  FOr those struggling with this issue, I wish you luck and hope you can resolve it.  If you can't, consider an Orbi, as this system seems SO MUCH MORE RELIABLE.

  @Jony_temperance it sounds like what you are seeing is one of the problems I have seen and reported to support.

It is my opinion that the node(s) showing as offline often bears no basis in fact and is a bug in the Deco app.

This problem is not one that can be resolved by support so I'm not surprised what happened to you.

I agree this reflects very poorly on TP Link (and probably Qualcomm) developers but I am able to ignore this and the other problems I see since there's no other alternative for me at this time.

I tried very hard to use the Orbi for a long long time and in the end it was fairly stable except for the fact that once the number of clients was over about 80 the DHCP server would stop issuing IP addresses too often. This happened most often during reboot and after frequently spending several hours trying to reboot the system I gave up on the Orbi. This is particularly bad because I actually saw the same problem when I went back to my RBR50 system briefly so it has been present in the order of years and, as far as I know, has not been resolved in spite of being reported on the Netgear forum several times by different people including myself.

For me the buggy Deco app is actually not as bad as the problem I had with the Orbi.

And yes, it's very poor that one has to decide on the system to use based on which one is "least broken" but it has been like that for quite a while now and not just with TP Link products.

I'm glad the Orbi works for you and I hope it continues to do so.

Oh and another interesting feature of Netgear is that after I canceled the auto-renew of my subscription to the security and parental control systems Netgear continued to bill me ... I was not impressed.

  @raven-au 

It sounds like your issues are more benign than my issues. I agree that if it was only a report of "false status" on the app then I could grin and bear it.  However, I am seeing sporadic connectivty issues that is causing a lot of instability in my network.  As satellites go up and down, devices get disconnected.  Of course this happens at the worst possible times like when I am on a conference call for work or talking to clients.  That is where I had to draw the line and get a more stable solution.  Good to know the limits you are seeing on the Orbi.  Given the number of devices I have, Orbi works for me, but as I scale, I will take note if I start to run into issues.  Thanks!