“Upgrading broadband isn’t something any of us do often, but when I found that gigabit broadband had finally reached my building, I found it impossible to resist,” Ben Lovejoy writes for 9to5Mac. “There was, however, one aspect of the upgrade I was dreading: The SSID of my old router was a historic accident, and I wanted to set a new SSID for the new one. My fear with that, however, was that it would break all my smart home device connections.”
Sure enough, moving over the hubs promptly resulted in “52 devices not responding” in the Home app.
My options appeared to be: One, give up on the whole idea and just use the same SSID as the old router; or two, spend many hours delving into the settings of many wireless device apps in order to update their Wi-Fi credentials…
Which was when I hit on a genius solution, even if I do say so myself. I reverted the changes I’d made, then gave a new SSID to the 5Ghz network on the new router, but re-used the old SSID for the 2.4GHz one. Voila…
MacDailyNews Take: Of course, with most modern routers, you could also enable a guest network with the proper Wi-Fi network name (SSID).
Modern day access points (AP) support multiple SSID. I can handle 8 SSID in my AP hardware. The problem is many old devices frequently require apps to change the stored SSID in the legacy hardware, but apps slowly drop support for legacy devices. We had some old Wink lighing that was left in our house from the previous owner. The SSID information can’t be updated in the current Wink app, because Wink dropped support for our hardware.