Surface Pro 4 not working with SuperHub 5

[matthlock]

Hi VM,

I received the SuperHub 5 yesterday and was excited to see if it would help with the Wi-Fi range in my house (seeing as the SuperHub 3 didn't cover my bedroom which is diagonally less that 10m from the hub to the back wall).

However, not only have I found no significant improvement but it's also broken the Wi-Fi on my Surface Pro 4 - it says it's connected but will not load anything.  It was working fine on the SH3 and if tethered to my phone. It even seems to work if I turn off 5Ghz and just use 2.4Ghz but I don't want to do that. I'm also able to get some sort of connection if I reduce the channel width but that's still flaky at best!

So well done VM! What a massive improvement!  And I'd appreciate your advice on how I'm going to get my device working again with your 'better' equipment.

Thanks.

[Adduxi · Accepted solution]

Hub 5 is still by invite only and it still in trials.  These things are expected until all the bugs are squashed and the firmware updated.

Having said that, have you tried splitting the SSID?  It may help.

• Access your Hub by navigating to 192.168.0.1
• Login with the default login info (on base of Hub) unless you've already updated it.
• Go to Advanced Settings > Wireless > Security
• Under Wireless Frequency 2.4GHz change the Wifi Network Name (SSID), suggest append _2 to the end.
• Repeat for the Wireless Frequency 5GHz, suggest append _5 to the end and click on Apply changes
• Try to avoid spaces and periods in the SSID names as they can cause issues with certain devices.

[matthlock]

Thanks for the quick response.

I did think of that, but it's not ideal having the SSIDs separated out, especially now that I need to revisit any other devices connected to my 2.4Ghz one and reconnect them. 

I appreciate the SH5 is still new but nowhere in the invite email did it say it was still under trial and there could be potential bugs.  I was under the impression that this was a polished product that would at least give the same functionality as the SH3.  Frankly, it's just not good enough and VM should be addressing these types of issues as a priority. I'm a technical person and so am able to change these settings but an average Joe would be clueless and left without a working Internet connection.

[matthlock]

I managed to find a setting on the SP4's Wi-Fi driver to set it to 2.4Ghz only and that's working fine now, so saves me messing with separating the radios out.

I did find a setting on the SH5 for wireless filter, which looked to be able to explicitly specify which radio a device can access, but I tried setting this so it could only connect to 2.4GHz and it still connects to the 5Ghz.  I'm not sure if I did that wrong or if it just doesn't work - the latter probably, as it's only specifying a MAC address.

This is very annoying and frustration.  I hope you sort out these bugs for the sake of other people, VM.

[gary_dexter]

Try disabling the AX protocol and see if it connects

[matthlock]

How do you disable ax?  All the options for wifi mode includes ax, as does the 2.4 radio.

[matthlock]

So I've been playing a bit more and noticed you have to turn the Wireless MAC filtering on - there are options for disabled, allow or deny which I didn't notice and assumed I was allowing access when it was still disabled.  So that's why it wasn't working. And now I've set it to allow and specified the MAC address for my SP4 for 2.4GHz it's only connecting to that.

I'm still not sure why this is necessary since it was working fine on the SH3.  Reading up a bit, it seems the Wi-Fi chipset in these devices are a bit sensitive to fast roaming with 5GHz, so maybe SH3 didn't have that?

Anyway, it took a while to get there but at least I have my device working on Wi-Fi, albeit only on 2.4Ghz.

I hope this helps anyone else who gets these issues.

[matthlock]

And as a follow up - make sure you deny the 5Ghz instead of allow 2.4Ghz.  That way, you don't have to specify all the other devices are allowed too. 😂

[Adduxi]

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@matthlock wrote:

<snip>   I'm still not sure why this is necessary since it was working fine on the SH3.  Reading up a bit, it seems the Wi-Fi chipset in these devices are a bit sensitive to fast roaming with 5GHz, so maybe SH3 didn't have that?

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Different chipset in the Hub 5 as it uses Broadcom and the Hub 3 was Intel Puma.

[ConnorRe]

How did you do this if you dont mind me asking? 

Ive got the same problem with my surface pro 6, all I find under mac filtering is complete blocking of the internet, not specifc freq's