Could my AP be dead?

Hi Everyone,

I have an 8 year old AC-Lite that supplies my home with WiFi and it has been great.

Recently I purchased several Smart Plugs to turn ON/OFF various devices in the home, and I connected them to Home Assistant (HA). In HA I had several automations to sync the various devices and turn them ON and OFF.

I noticed strange behaviour of these automations so I did some investigations. I found the Smart Devices where randomly becoming unavailable on the network, which was the cause of my issues. I made a script to ping the Smart Plugs every 15 secs and log when if failed and was successful. There were many random failures of all the Smart Plugs.

Thinking I had a dud brand of Smart Devices (TP-Link) I purchased a couple of another brand. Same issues.

As all the Smart Devices were within several metres of the AC-Lite I started thinking my WiFi might be the issue. So I got an old Modem/Router out of the cupboard and configured it as an AP. Disconnected the AC-Lite and waited.

No errors in HA, no ping issues with my script. All was good.

So is my AC-Lite dead, or is there some setting that could be doing this?

TIA