Duplicate IP addresses causing both Hitron CGNM-2250 WiFi radios to shut down?

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Has anyone with a Hitron CGNM-2250 ever heard about this before?

We recently had a service call for a defective Hitron router, which has since been upgraded to an Arris XB6.

The service tech mentioned an issue he'd seen where duplicate IP addresses on a customer's network caused both radios on their router (i.e. 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) to switch themselves off.

I don't think so!

Supposedly, even the status LEDs for both radios also went off. Now, I don't doubt that this person had a wireless problem with their router, or even that the radios were somehow turned off. It's possible to manually disable them in the web interface, and perhaps a glitch or hardware fault could cause them to disable themselves somehow. What I'm struggling to believe that an IP address conflict would do this.

So many questions!

1) Is such behavior by design or simply because the router "can't handle" an IP address conflict and is somehow overwhelmed by it?

2) If it's by design, that means it's baked into the firmware and all Hitrons with the same firmware would do it, every single time an IP address conflict was detected. Except they don't. It never happens. If this was feature (and not a bug), then why can't this behavior be reproduced by manually creating an IP address conflict on other identical models?

3) If this is a real phenomenon, why can't I find a single reference to it on Google?!

4) If it's by design, then why does the router not turn off its LAN ports also? The LAN ports and both WiFi networks all use the same subnet and DHCP scope. There is no difference between them, as far as IP address conflicts are concerned.

5) If it's by design... what is the purpose? Instead of just two devices losing connectivity (as normally happens with an IP address conflict), having both radios shut down only makes the problem worse, as now everything loses connectivity.

6) How would the tech even know if there was an IP address conflict? Try disconnecting your laptop from your wireless network, then running "ipconfig" in Command Prompt. You can't see an IP address. It will say "Media disconnected" and will not tell you what the DHCP assigned address was. So even if there had been a conflict, you would not be able to see it once the WiFi was offline.

What do you guys think? Is it my imagination or is there no way this could be true?

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