How to Fix an Echo or Google Home That Won’t Connect to WiFi

Congratulations, you have a new Google Home or Amazon Echo device! But for some reason, even though you’re confident you have the password correct, it won’t connect to Wi-Fi. The good news is, there are easy solutions to try.

Whether you have a new Google Home or new Amazon Echo device, setup should be easy. As long as you have the correct accounts created, the apps walk you through all the steps in a straightforward manner. But occasionally you might get hung up on connecting to Wi-Fi, even when you’re sure you have the password correct. Often, the problem isn’t your password but the network you’ve chosen or that your smartphone is trying to maintain a working internet connection.

Enable Airplane Mode and Turn On Wi-Fi

Echo and Google Home devices learn your Wi-Fi details through a handoff. Your smartphone directly connects to the device (creating a temporary Wi-Fi network specific to them), and then the Google or Amazon app passes on the information about your SSID (the name of your Wi-Fi network) and password. Unfortunately, smartphones are aggressive about maintaining a good network connection. When you connect to the new network, your device might realize it can’t find the internet and fall back to using your cellular data instead. When that happens, your phone disconnects from the Google Home or Echo and the setup process can’t complete.

To avoid this, before you begin the setup process turn on airplane mode in your phone’s settings. Then turn on Wi-Fi (which airplane mode just turned off). Once you have reconnected to your network launch the Google Home or Alexa app and try the setup process again.

Falling back to cellular is a common enough problem that Wink makes this same suggestion when setting up its hub.

Try a Different Wi-Fi Band

Google Home and Amazon Echo can connect to either the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band. It can be tempting to use the 5 GHz band since it tends to run into fewer congestion issues and provide faster speeds, and for those reasons, it probably should be your first choice. But consider how far your new voice assistant is from the router. If that distance is far (you’re at the edges of your house), then your connection may not be reliable. In that scenario, try the 2.4 GHz band. If you already are trying to use the 2.4 GHz band, then try the 5 GHz band, as interference may be the issue. If you have a mesh system, it will take care of choosing the best band for you.

Ad-Hoc Networks May Be Unsupported

Read the remaining 8 paragraphs

via: howtogeek.com