Surface Laptop 3 Intel AX201 & RT-AX88U only connecting on AC

[mindfrost82]

I setup my RT-AX88U the other day and initially my Surface Laptop 3 would connect on AX, and continued to use AX after flashing to Merlin Firmware.

Going through the forums, I made all the usual tweak suggestions (set control channels for 2.4GHz & 5GHz, disabled Airtime Fairness, disabled Universal Beamforming, etc).

At some point during the tweaks, my Surface Laptop 3 will only connect to AC (according to the Win10 WiFi properties and according to the RT-AX88U).

I have 160MHz enabled since the Intel AX201 supports it.

I'm not sure if there's a specific setting that caused this. I've tried undoing changes one-by-one but it continues to only connect on AC.

EDIT: It's worth noting that the two iPhone 11 Pro's we have in the house show they're still using AX, so it appears to only be the Surface Laptop 3 with the Intel AX201 card. I also installed the latest driver from Intel's site.

Any thoughts on this or suggestions to try?

 

[L&LD]

You didn't do a full reset/Initialize all settings after flashing to RMerlin firmware?

Try setting up a Guest network with full access with an SSID you've never connected to before that is 8 alphanumeric characters with no spaces, punctuation, special characters or smiley faces. Pair that with a 16 alphanumeric character password with the same attributes.

 

[mindfrost82]

You didn't do a full reset/Initialize all settings after flashing to RMerlin firmware?

Try setting up a Guest network with full access with an SSID you've never connected to before that is 8 alphanumeric characters with no spaces, punctuation, special characters or smiley faces. Pair that with a 16 alphanumeric character password with the same attributes.

I did do a full reset after I flashed RMerlin and also used a new SSID when setting up the new router. It also connected to AX fine after I first flashed RMerlin, it only connects on AC now after doing tweaks. I just can't seem to narrow down what combination of changes caused AX to stop working with this laptop.

 

[mindfrost82]

Disregard this post. Stupid on my part. I just checked the Advanced driver settings on the Intel AX201 and somehow it was set to AC mode. I never changed that, so I'm not sure how it got set that way. Either way, I changed it back to AX and now all is well again.

 

[L&LD]

See if the new Guest SSID with the indicated attributes changes anything.

You did reboot the router and the laptop between your tweaks, correct?

 

[Mutzli]

Also check the driver version for the AX201. I had some issues with the one from November. Right now I'm using version 21.80.2.1 from 2/25/2020. You can find the driver here: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/en/product/189347/Intel-Wi-Fi-6-AX200