I ran into a problem where my devices, including laptop, desktop, mobile devices, saying IP confilict. Part of the problem I think because I have too many devices connected to the router including WIFI and hard cabled. I thought the router would be smart enough not to assign an IP that already been use? I guess not, or maybe because of timing issue. Not sure, but the problem appears to be happening to me for at least one router that I have problem with.

How to solve this? simple solution is set up a static IP for all my devices. I believe from 2 to 254, so up to 254 IPs devices on my local LAN. Some people said the router can only support 32 WIFI devices, I don’t know how true this may be? but it does make sense for a home network, due to network congestion bandwidth and stuff. If 32 devices connected wifi and all download at the same time, you can imagine the bandwidth issue may have this it. so maybe 32 or devices might be a limit, but really I don’t think it should be restricted to just 32 devices, because let say you’re just connecting to check email and surf the web, not streaming or downloading movies.

Setting a static device will surely solve the IP conflict problem. I think it’s also best to set IP in the 50 range, like 192.168.1.50 51 52 53 54 … and so on. Because let say you have some new devices connecting, and it’s not static IP, so the router will assign the dynamic IP, and normally it’s in the single digit range.

I don’t know a whole about network, but I know how to make it work and trouble the issue may encounters. Nor I took any official network configuration class.