Aria vs Linksys E7350

[Awfulhak]

I recently upgraded my wifi router to a Linksys E7350.  My Aria scale stopped working.  After spending over an hour going through different permutations of channels, protocols, channel width, all I can say is that the Aria is seeing the 5Ghz SSID only, but fails to connect consistently, all the time.  It's fine connecting to my other older router.

Very frustrating.  There doesn't seem to be any official firmware upgrade options for Aria, just a whole slew of complaints about Aria network incompatibilities.  This issue follows hot on the heels of me upgrading my watch to a Fitbit Sense only to find that the GPS is really poor quality and Fitbit Sense doesn't support Connected GPS.  I bought the Sense so that I could have the highest quality device available, but instead just got the highest price available.

The bit I don't understand, given the number of complaints here, is why there aren't hundreds of firmware versions for these devices.  Doesn't Fitbit take these complaints seriously?  What are the Fitbit developers doing with their time?  Where are the updates that fix these issues?  I would expect new firmware releases on a weekly cadence to keep up with these problems, but... there are almost none.  Maybe I'm missing something?  It looks like Aria has a single firmware update in the past 3-5 years, and Fitbit Sense has had maybe 3 or 4 updates in the past 8 months.

What are you doing Fitbit?  I've gone from someone that recommended Fitbit to someone that actively reports how Fitbit is completely unresponsive to issues and drops features in newer devices.

I think it's time to cut my losses and move to a different vendor, but Fitbit, please escalate this support issue.  Your organization is failing badly and is an embarrassment to the whole software industry.  Your management needs to know this and do something about it before the whole organization collapses.

[SunsetRunner]

First off, does your new router meet the original requirements of the Aria?

Networking Requirements
The Fitbit Aria connects directly to your home’s wireless network and supports the
following network configurations:
 Wireless 802.11b standard
 WEP / WPA / WPA2 personal security
 Automatic (DHCP) IP setup (static IP configuration not supported)
Aria requires an 802.11b-compatible network to connect and sync your scale data to
your Fitbit dashboard.

There will not be a firmware update that can change these requirements as they are hardware requirements. I'm also not sure that the Aria can reliably connect to 5G networks.

[Awfulhak]

Hi,

Yes, the router's 2.4GHz receiver is currently configured to talk B/G/N/AX.  I read that it only does B, but when I renamed the 5GHz SSID and attempted to reconfigure the Aria, it listed the 5GHz SSID and not the 2.4GHz SSID.  As an experiment, I turned the protocol down to just B and the Aria continued to fail to connect.

I'm no hardware guy, but my understanding is that if there's only 2.4GHz hardware in the Aria, it shouldn't be able to see the 5GHz broadcast.  Also, even if it can originally only talk 802.11b, I would expect that the protocol is managed by firmware.  It should be updatable at least to protocols that don't try to do anything clever with channel bonding.

Regardless of all this, given the number of problems here, I'm pretty sure any product manager worth their salt could at least drive the development team towards producing better diagnostics and maybe coming up with a better story than "Network Error".  Even if this isn't possible, they could possibly trouble themselves to write up a kb to explain the difficulties.

It's not just the Aria, I received the same boilerplate no-help-at-all responses to my complaints about the Fitbit Sense.  Fitbit are not doing a good job of dealing with support issues.  So what's with that?

[SunsetRunner]

This is a user supported forum. Have you tried contacting Fitbit support?

[Awfulhak]

I admit i haven't talked to support.  My reasoning is that the only thing that would solve my problem is for Fitbit to fix their firmware.  If Fitbit's development/qa team don't have a huge array of Fitbit and router devices that they test compatibility with (which they clearly don't), then that support person will only lead me through the painful cycle of putting the Aria in setup mode, connecting to its network, typing in the scale name and my initials, selecting the network and watching it fail.  What else could they do?  The device works - there's nothing wrong with it except that it hasn't been updated for the past 5 years and can't talk to newer routers.