Galaxy S23 Ultra WiFi TP-Link Router - Wifi 6 - Ony 1 Connection Allowed

[ken98045]

I have a TP-Link AX11000 acting as my main router and a Netgear Rax45 acting as an access point attached to the TP-Link.  Both use Wi-Fi 6.

As other posts here and posts on other sites have pointed out there are very, very frequent but random cases where the S23 completely loses the Internet connection but maintains the connection to the router.  This can be verified by looking at the Wi-Fi settings page.   However, this ONLY happens when connected to the TP-Link AX11000 using WiF-6.  If I connect to the Netgear router (also using Wi-Fi 6) everything is fine.

However, I am also having another very weird problem only with the TP-Link.  Here is a specific case:  I am reading a news feed that has made an internet connection. and read the feed data.  Then I try to go to a link to a site from that feed.  That link will not open.  Yet I can refresh the original feed page and get new results.

So, I do have an internet connection going for one site, but it refuses to create a second/different internet connection.   When this happens, I am not in the state where the Wi-Fi settings show a router connection but no internet connection.  The setting just shows a good router + internet connection.

This also happens in a wide range of other circumstances where I am using a browser.  The browser can open a connection to Google and download search results, but links won't open.  I can do as many searches as I want but can't go anywhere.  This is very random, but only on the TP-Link.

Very strange.  On another thread Samsung replied to the Wi-Fi/no internet problem saying that they are working on it.  I just want them to be aware that it isn't just that you can have a router connected but not an Internet connection.  You can also have cases where only one connection is apparently possible.  I suspect that this is a problem where the DNS lookup is failing, but this isn't clear.  I also suspect that if they fix the "no internet connection" problem they will fix this other issue.  Still, I want to point out this second issue to make sure that whatever solution they come up with fixes this problem as well.

BTW, tech support people still refuse to believe that the 23 has any Wi-Fi problems at all.  The only way I found out that these problems were specific to the TP-Link was from T-Mobile tech support.  If I hadn't found that out, I would have returned the S23.  If Samsung doesn't fix these issues soon I will be forced to return it.  Thankfully I purchased through Costco I have 90 days to return it.

[Biggus]

TP link defaults to using tri-band for WiFi 6 when the router is set up, but my experience is that the phone will switch to the 2.4GHz network only as soon as the signal drops at all and never reconnect to the 5GHz networks for whatever reason. 2.4GHz is usually uselessly slow anyway.

I had this issue when I got one of their Wifi 6 routers on initial setup and immediately went into the advanced config and shut off the 2.4G network (you can just set a different password on it if you need it for other things) and stopped having issues. I don't know if this will help you or not. I still only get dual 5G connections from basically the same room as the router, but wifi is objectively terrible anyway so I was already expecting speed advertisements to be a scam. WiFi 7 will be even worse; the top speeds require 4096-QAM modulation. Coax cable (Comcast, don't use them but I've troubleshooted their modems) usually can't maintain higher than 256-QAM links, so a phone might get full speed 2x2 WiFi 7 sitting a foot above the router antennas, and as usual the advertised speeds are for 8 way links that almost nothing has the antenna count for (in the case of some routers they don't even have enough usable channels to maintain advertised speed to an extender with enough antennas)

The other related issue is that WiFi 6 (802.11x) is a downgrade from 5 (802.11ac) in most cases thanks to lower broadcast power and in my case a lack of TP Link supporting enough of the upper channels to allow a 160MHz wide link through them because they were apparently too lazy to be bothered with DFS on this model and never updated firmware despite advertising support. I'd regularly get a 1.2Gb link across my fairly small house on 802.11ac, now it's ~200 most of the time and sometimes hangs. The newer wifi security has already been broken so no gains there either. Between that and total lack of logging or useful firewall configuration (or even logs) on newer TP Link hardware I'm swapping my old ISP provided ZyXel back in and using the Wifi on that and turning the TP Link into an expensive dumb switch or ebaying it and now have both them and netgear crossed off my list, sadly.

Anyway I'd try disabling or changing the password on the 2.4G first. I'm pretty sure that part is a phone issue since I had the same problems with trying to use both with the same password the ZyXel (802.11ac) and a Note8 years ago, although those only had one wifi antenna.

[ken98045]

I don't have the "smart" switching to other bands enabled.  So, I don't ever switch to 2.4 automatically.  I use separate SSID for each band.  I never use the 2.4 except on the Netgear AP, and that is also a separate SSID (and is only used for some devices that only support 2.4).

Wi-Fi 6 has sufficient range to cover the house -- except for the fact that it doesn't work with the S23 reliably with TP-Link.  It does (with some minor exceptions) work on the Netgear AP with Wi-Fi 6.  The TP-Link does have better range than the Netgear RAX 45 (if it would work).

[Biggus]

First off I'm not saying the S23 doesn't have issues, there's obviously something wrong with it. A quick internet search shows most people just turning off 802.11ax on their routers to get a reliable connection... The issue you're having sounds more severe though, like near constant DNS lookup issues. It wouldn't really be one site working at once since any given page loads so much JavaScript and tracking stuff from so many CDNs anymore that it takes 8 DNS lookups to get the page to display after looking up the site it's on.

This isn't going to fix it, but I would actually assign the same SSID / pw to both 5G bands and let the phone & router pick whether it's using one or both. You can do this and mix and match the SAE and WPA3 settings if you have older devices that don't support those and the 802.11ac stuff will only connect to the WPA2 authenticated band, btw. According to Samsung the S23 Ultra only has one 5G antenna so giving it another range of channels to hop over to isn't going to hurt. Their max listed speed of 2.4Gb/s only works with Wifi 6E. While I was looking that up, I found that the Note20 Ultra only supports 80MHz wide channels and only has a single 5GHz antenna. Since one of the main upgrades with 802.11ax was supposed to be required 160MHz channel support, I'm not quite sure how they're calling it an ax-capable device unless 80+80 is allowed instead. It shows 1.1Gb/s very close to the router so I'm guessing that's what's being done. In any case the less populated channels on the router can be used to achieve 80+80 if a DFS channel group is dropped due to passing air traffic or one of the low power channels goes out of range in your case, but not if only a single 5GHz SSID is used since they don't share bands. You can also reduce the chances of the connection being forced to new channels by locking the first SSID's channel to the non-DFS 80MHz channel in the first connection's settings. Supposedly DFS switches don't interrupt anything but the phone may not be detecting it correctly?

I'm not sure if you've turned on the show detailed wifi status option in developer mode settings or not but it can tell you far more detail about your connection strength and channel(s) than is normally visible. The icon for the connection rarely has anything to do with how strong the connection actually is, and I'm pretty sure after some tests that both the number of bars given for signal quality and the actual connection quality are unrelated. The icon still shows a full speed connection even when the connection is dropped and negotiating. You can see how many router addresses are in use, too. Often one is more congested and has a worse connection.

None of this should be causing your DNS lookup failures but I thought I'd point it out. I recall the Note 8 sometimes showing several bars of signal to an 802.11ac connection but taking forever to access anything before I messed with the router settings and forced an 80MHz channel with almost zero support in other router brands to avoid my stuff jumping to 20MHz or off a working channel because a neighbor's router decided to have a fight with it.

A couple things I've found online that helped some people get rid of these issues:
- Setting channel width to 80 on the router on at least one SSID, probably both. If what I suspected above is true this makes some level of sense, since 80MHz never *requires* DFS whereas 160 always does. As far as I'm concerned the less the router is telling the phone to reconfigure the better.
- Under advanced->wireless->addl. settings change the beacon time from 100ms to 90ms.
- Change to 802.11ac, max connection speed lowers very little and all the issues disappear. Since you don't have 6e, I'd go this route probably.

[Biggus]

One final thing to try before the others in your case is changing the router's first DNS server to 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS) to verify it isn't having problems getting a working one from your ISP automatically or theirs isn't having sporadic issues, but this seems unlikely given it being brand specific.

I just switched my router to 802.11ac to check the speeds vs ax and they tripled from across the house according to speedtest to the ISP's server, btw. 802.11ax didn't drop TX power *that* much so I'm wondering if the implementation on either these phones or the TP-Links (or both) is just flawed in general.

[ken98045 · Accepted solution]

I think I solved my problem.  I'm relatively sure it is still an S23 Firmware (possibly hardware) problem, but it is one that is easy to get around.

First, the router I have (TP-Link AX11000) is WiFi 6, not the WiFi 6e version.  I had previously made a change to my router settings to change the 5GHz radio to a channel width of 160Mhz.  This worked perfectly with the S21+ I had previously.

After someone on a TP-Link forum said that his S23 worked perfectly with the S23 I took a third look at my settings.  I changed the channel width to "auto" (essentially 80Mhz) everything started working fine.  It is a little too soon to say conclusively that that this was the problem, but I'm almost certain that it is.

This is not anything I would have expected.  Also, it is not something that many people would run across.  I'd be very interested to see if anyone can duplicate this problem with a non TP-Link router that supports 160Mhz channels.

[tc0566]

I have the same router.. if set channels to Auto, it loses the internet after a few hours.

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[Biggus]

Glad you have a workaround. I think the thing about changing to 80MHz fixing it was posted by somebody with an Asus router if that helps any.

[ken98045]

With tp-link you need to deliberately turn on 160. I believe that this is typically the case with other brands. I'd be surprised if more than about 1% of users do so. That cuts way down of the complaints, which cuts down on the priority of fixes. That said I know that Samsung is working on a fix for a very similar symptom WiFi 6e issue. Maybe whatever fix they come up with will fix this.

[Biggus]

Most don't turn off the default of "auto" either. I'd expect auto to use 160MHz if it thought there was a speed advantage but like I said it requires either low power indoor channels or DFS channels to operate on 160MHz width without 6e. I'm guessing internal logic doesn't think it's an advantage very often, especially given routers' general preference when set to auto on prioritizing your neighbor's 20MHz 802.11g connection not being interfered with in any way over giving your devices maximal speeds.