So let me state that everyone has troubles with WiFi every once in a while and when you do, troubleshooting can get difficult very fast. There are a ton of reasons why WiFi connections could be failing or causing trouble, but one of the most annoying and misunderstood one must be where you have devices that are working fine and others that do not.  So let me start with the one that was haunting me for months, clients call me ever so often about problems with their WiFi. Usually simple solutions work, restarting, resetting, maybe reinstalling some software or drivers, an update, that sort of stuff. But there was one client that kept having problems with his WiFi. His android phone could connect, his old Windows 7 laptop, but on his new Windows 10 laptop his wireless network would not even show up! What the hell!? So at first i thought, must be an issue with the Windows 10. But i struck a dead end with that, so just to make sure the new machine was fine i booted from a Linux prepared USB drive. And voila, without doing any diagnostics it found the WiFi and connected without any issues! Hmm, so perhaps the Windows driver is the problem? It fixes itself?A day later the client called me to thank me for fixing his WiFi. Huh!? I didn't even do anything yet, so what happened? Windows could not have updated itself offline, so how did this get fixed? I could only think that something was going on with the router at this point, but then again why did it work on Linux the other day? A week later i get the same client on the phone telling me once again he can't connect to his WiFi. Right, well time to check that router then. After a laborious checkup i couldn't find any strange settings in the router, so i thought perhaps another router is interfering on that channel. So i check the connection on my Android phone... Aha! It was connected to channel 13 :-P But seriously, channel 13 is out of the normal range (from an US point of view). However in the EU we have up to channel 13 available, maybe something was going on with that. So i checked the router settings again and the channel was set to auto (meaning the router checks at every boot which channel is least used and sets the WiFi to that channel). So i set the router to channel 11 and hey presto, WiFi works on the new laptop. The actual problemSo after that trail and error i had an idea what was going on, i looked in the device manager of Windows and sure enough the laptop had an Intel WiFi adapter. Earlier i mentioned here in the EU we have different channels available, a list of that:
When the router uses channel 13 it goes beyond the allowed channels in the US, but the laptop was setup properly for use in the EU and also acquired in the EU. This should make the extra channels available right? But no, Intel's explanation:
Gee, thanks Intel, that helps. Microsoft isn't very helpful either, stating they obey the law. Yeah i get that, but how does Windows determine/set the region? Microsoft's reply to this problem is that this is set under region settings in the the control panel, but might not be used by the driver. If such is indeed the case then you will need a regional driver or worse, the channels might even be limited by firmware. ConclusionWell this is the sort of tech tale where you can only conclude the FCC are being dicks and Intel very lazy with their drivers. Luckily i had a means to solve all the issues concerning this problem so far, yet i feel screwed. At least provide the user with an option to set the region manually or make it more transparent how and what governs the region setting. Somehow the world is now limited to the US standards only because the FCC is not satisfied. Maybe the hardware manufacturers are also to blame, but seriously is this such a hard thing to accomplish? For now, you have no choice. Either buy a different WiFi card, switch to Linux or set your router to a specific or lower channel. |
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