HomePod Mini Internet Connectivity Issues

Having been struggling with the issue of HomePod minis repeatedly losing connection, and the two software updates not fixing it, I think I may have discovered the cause, at least in my situation.

The issues I’d been seeing were with my Minis in my living room, which are a stereo pair and are the farthest away from an access point (I have multiple APs throughout the house), is they would regularly lose the internet connection. This would cause issues ranging from the stereo pairing breaking, to Siri saying she was having trouble with the connection, and it would cause issues with my HomeKit setup and give me disconnected notifications for my HKSV cameras, when one of the Minis had been acting as the HomeHub.

I have a 2.4GHz / 5GHz network using the same SSID (WifI name) on both networks so devices can seamlessly pick the better band without having to provide multiple connection passwords.

What appeared to be happening is my Minis were flip flopping between the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, losing connection each time before eventually reconnecting. No other devices in my house appeared to be having this issue, as modern WiFi devices are designed to cope with this setup.

However, what appears to have been causing the disconnection issues was a feature called “band steering”, referred to as “Smart Connect” on my Netgear APs. This is a feature where the AP will try to push the device onto the “better” WiFi band to improve the connection. However, in the case of the Minis in my living room, they weren’t dealing with the band steering tidily (for whatever reason) and this was causing them to lose the connection.

Having disabled band steering (Smart Connect in my settings) things have settled right down. I’ll admit it has only been around 35 hours since I made this change, however we have not encountered connection issues with the Minis and I’ve stopped receiving HKSV camera disconnected notifications, where I had been receiving around 10 to 15 per day, previously.

Your mileage may vary, but if you’re having connection issues with your HomePods and your router has a band steering feature, I would try disabling this to see if it helps.

I got my brand new HomePod mini a couple of days ago and immediately started having the same issue- queries being answered with “I am having trouble connecting to the Internet.“ As others have noticed, it is still possible to stream to the device with the problem being seemingly localized to not being able to address queries. At first, I tried simply restarting the unit which fixed the problem temporarily but it came back within an hour or so. Also, one time it seem to clear up when I toggled Wi-Fi on my phone on and off but that was not a reliable fix. Then I tried the usual solutions, reinstalling, rebooting the router, etc. etc. all to no avail. I also tried linking to Wi-Fi on my VPN router on the theory that it was much closer but that was worse if anything.

And then, I looked at my router settings and noticed that the iPad mini was only getting 7% signal. I actually have two SSSID’s, one coming from a powerline adapter because the router is too far from my office for a decent signal. The weaker one was the one being used by the iPad mini because that was the one that the iPhone was using when the HomePod mini was installed. So I ended up switching to the SSID with the much stronger signal and since then I have no problems. It makes sense to me that the unit would have trouble if the Wi-Fi signal was not strong enough (not sure why the VPN router didn’t work since that is almost next to the HomePod mini.) I also noticed in the router settings that the HomePod mini was now showing a full 1 gbit/sec connection in comparison to the earlier slower connection.

Anyway, as I said, everything has been stable for a while now and hopefully that will continue. So maybe something of my experience might help somebody else. I would recommend checking into the signal strength of the Wi-Fi being used by the HomePod mini to see if that might be the source of the issue.

I have the same problems here with the homepodmini and the Asus BlueCave. After a few hours of not using the homepodmini, Siri always have problems with the connection. AirPlay is no problem all the time.

After reading these thread, i changed some settings in my BlueCave and now, the homepodmini is fully usable since 3 days! Hopefully, you can change it like me:

• Set the DHCP-Leasetime to 28.800 seconds (8 hours) - before, it was set to 86.400 seconds (1 day)
• Disable "SmartConnect" or in other routers it is sometimes named "BandSteering" - this normally gives a device the message, to switch from 2,4 GHz to 5 GHz or otherwise - when disabled, every device would chose the frequency itself
• My WiFi for 2,4 GHz and 5 GHz have both the same name

Since i made this settings, my mini automatically connects to my 5 GHz WiFi and runs without errors :)

@gbmole - the Blue Cave is the problem. No settings adjustment will help. Using a different router will almost certainly solve the problem, as this thread indicates. It is a small number of people actually experiencing this issue, as most routers work fine with the HomePods & Mini.

Note: one should NEVER need to make adjustments to a wifi router beyond setting your SSID and password. Anything else is a recipe for trouble nearly 100% of the time (I work in networking).

My hunch is that the router is screwing up mDNS, also known as Bonjour. No router settings will fix that.

As mentioned previously, I had this problem with my Blue Cave and spent a few days working with Apple Support looking into the problem. I replaced the Blue Cave with a Portal router that I had lying around and the problem went away. I then replace the Portal with a new TP-Link Archer C2300 and it has performed flawlessly since it was installed. I have it set up with the Same SSID for 2.4 and 5 GHz and it works seamlessly with all 23 devices that connect to it.

For what it's worth, the issue does not seem to be 2.4 vs 5 GHz. While working with Apple I had the issue with both connections. Both the Portal and the Archer support single SSID mode and neither has presented any trouble with the Home Pod Min. This router change also resolved a similar problem with a Mac Mini that would lose its connection periodically and not automatically rejoin the network until it was done manually.

Throwing in my two sense here as someone who works in IT and was having all issues mentioned here with my stereo pair. They are in the living room in direct sight of the router. We have AT&T Fiber 1000 internet as well and were using the provided BGW210 Router. We were having issues with the internet about a year ago and the tech that came told me that the routers provided by AT&T seem to have issues with band steering and that one of the things that I should do was split the bands.

Enter homepod mini in November and the start of the issues. Stereo pair would always break, they wouldn't respond, one would play a song and the other would play a completely separate song. I was restarting them or completely resetting them multiple times a week. I thought back to what the AT&T tech said after reading this forum. I decided to split the bands and connect to the 5GHz network. That stopped the issues for a few days, but then they came back. I decided to move the HomePods to the 2.4GHz network and sure enough they worked like a charm since mid December, not a single issue. Recently, I was getting sick of the AT&T router always having issues so I decided to give the new Linksys Velop MX10 WiFi 6 system a try since it was getting homekit support sometime soon. Since I got that system up and running last week no issues with the homepods and they connect to the living room node just fine on the 5GHz band according to the app. On a side note the Linksys Velop Mesh Wifi system has been AMAZING.

However, I agree that I shouldn't need to buy new hardware or have networking knowledge just to get these things to work. That's what attracts people to Apple, ease of use. These have provided the most frustration of any product in awhile, and now that they are working I love them. I can see how someone without the knowledge to troubleshoot this would get frustrated and return the mini. The issue seems to have something to do with band steering on certain routers and the 5GHz band. Hopefully Apple will update these soon to help people and their frustration.

I had numerous issues with my HomePod minis. Various tweaks, such as disabling band steering improved things, however didn’t solve the issues altogether. In the end, replacing my 5 year old ASUS router with a relatively new TP-Link unit cleared up all the issues with the HomePod minis. There’s clearly something with the way some routers work that the Minis don’t like. None of my other 50 odd devices on my home network had issues, so this is definitely something with the way Apple have programmed the Minis. Bizarrely, the regular HomePod I’ve had since they came out has had no issues.

I had the same issue. As soon as i have connected them they almost immediately started dropping connection. I couldn’t play even one song without the homepod the stop half way through the song so i did some digging. I discovered that they mostly prefer 5ghz frequency. I am in uk and my router comes from BT. These current BT routers do not allow you to split bands, so you cant have 2 independent bands therefore you cant set up 2 independent wifi networks. If both bands are turned on they work as a kind of hybrid/combined network so any devices in your home will switch to whichever they find is more optimal. But there are some devices like my yamaha yas soundbar( and of course the homepod mini) that gets confused about this combined dual band setup and cannot find the 2.4 ghz frequency. The soundbar just gets confused and is always serching. Anyway, i believe it is a somewhat similar situation with the homepod minis. So on your router if you have both bands turned on the homepod will attempt possibly at some point to connect to 2.4 ghz at which point it will drop the connection. For me the solution was to turn of the 2.4 band and only keep the 5 one open. The result was instant. No more drops in connection. I can now airplay for hours and Siri also works without any problems. If this doesn’t work for you you may want to de-register and re -register your home pod.

Apologies if this was suggested before or if my description is not technically accurate but this worked for me instantly.

I have 4 HomePod mini, connected to a 5ghz wifi band. Had the same trouble. After countless calls with Apple support, 2 devices refunds, finally they told me to connect it to a 2,4 ghz wifi band.

Up to today (2 days have passed) they are working ok, including a stereo pair.

Supposedly there are some ports than need to be open in the router for them to work on 5ghz. So if I’d still have that issue, I would look into that.

It may be to soon to claim victory, but this is the longest that they have worked.

I had similar issues (even unable to setup my HomePod Mini) which were solved with help of the Apple support. One of their employees had the right idea (at least for my case). Many users have a lot of devices connected to their network. When the connected devices get to many, the address range configured in the DHCP server might be too small to give every device an IP address. So when the HomePod Mini connects to your wifi it get's no IP address and simply says that the wifi connection failed. What you can try is extending the address range for your router's DHCP server in it's config.

I'm also on the blue cave and was told by Asus to downgrade to the previous firmware for some other issues. I did that and then manually assigned all of my HomePods IP addresses instead of using DCHP and that seems to have worked for 2 days straight. Maybe there is a DHCP-related bug.

You can also go into settings on the home app for the mini, you’ll see a little cogged wheel, you’ll find restart/reset there as well, but I haven’t had a problem since turning off recognise my voice, and I had all the same problems as people on this forum were having.

My WiFi connectivity problems are solved. My HomePod Mini is sitting right in front of my iMac and also next to my wireless printer. Even though these other devices had no connectivity issues, the HomePod Mini did. My WiFi access point is about 50’ away from these devices. So I added another access point in the room where these devices are located and connectivity issues of HomePod Mini have been eliminated.

This worked for me. Go to the home app on the device used to set up mini. Press on the little house in the top left.

find the home settings.

press on the picture/name of yourself is, this takes you to a final menu and turn off “recognise my voice”. This worked for me, then if it does work you could try turning it back on or just leave it off as I have.

Small Update on my testing... I am using an enterprise Cisco WiFi AIR-2702-I-Z-K9 With a Meraki DHCP server Connecting at 5Ghz at -48db (as measured by iphone 12pro max in diag mode) the 3 x Home Pod Mini will always stay associated to WiFi but loose connectivity after about 24 hours. If I change the DHCP least time to 30 minutes then the 3 x Home Pod Mini kept working for 5 days + If I change the DHCP lease time to 7 days then the then the 3 x Home Pod Mini kept working for abount 24 hours. I have now set a DHCP reservation for the IP address soand I will run a continuious ping to see exactly how long the network connectivity lasts.