Alternate channel: what does it mean and what to do?

Whenever an Access Point reports a WiFi radio operating on an unsupported channel, a warning in form of a grey triangle will appear in the status column of the Access Points list. On mouse hover, the message The # radio on 2.4GHz/5GHz is operating on alternate channel will pop up, as shown below.

What does it mean?

This means our cloud automatically selected a WiFi channel different from your network configuration, to ensure your Access Point can continue to operate normally. This happens whenever a radio channel configured for your entire network is not compatible with a specific Access Point model, or is legally not permitted depending on the country in which your devices are deployed. 

What to do?

To avoid this issue in the future, we highly suggest to enable WiFi AI. This useful tool will automatically pick the best channels for each device in your network. To activate it, navigate to Settings > Network > WiFi settings and click on the toggle next to "WiFi AI". You can learn more about our WiFi AI in this article.

You also have the option to manually override your WiFi channel configuration either for a specific device or the whole network. Navigate to Settings > Network > WiFi settings to adjust your network-wide settings. Alternatively, you can quickly reach the device specific settings page by clicking on the gear icon  in the error message, and adjust the channel settings for this particular Access Point.