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Forum Discussion
The dreaded Samsung Galaxy WIFI authentication error with ORBI
Ok for as long as I had my ORBI's (RBK53 - 1 Router 2 sats) (3- years+ now) and as long as I had Samsung Galaxy cell phones (S6, S7, S8, Note9) the Samsung Galaxy cell phones will randomly get the WIFI authentication error after a number of hours or days at home on the ORBI wifi network. Assuming because as you are moving around the house and moving between ORBI Router and ORBI Satelities. This is just a fact of life. I tried various tweaks along the years and none of them work. (30+ years in IT). The fix is to turn off wifi on the cell phone and reenable (Takes about 5-8 secs). But there are issues when the phones wifi is having authentication errors - you miss notifications to your phone from apps.... as the WIFI is stuck. Internet is unusable until you turn off/on WIFI.
3 of the peoiple in my house have Apple phones and dont have this issue. It is only the Samsung Galaxy Phones (currently S8 Active and Note 9) all with whatever latest OS and patches that ATT pushes to us. (Android 9 with patches every couple of months).
Does anyone have a definitive answer to this problem? Please dont answer with did you try this, did you try that... latest firmware. This is a long standing problem with Samsung Galaxy phones and there are probably 1000's of postings on this issue.
By now "years" this must have been brought to Netgear and Samsung support organization for a collabroative fix? If so what is it?
I really dont want to move off of Android to an Apple cell phone to fix this issue.
I am looking for the reponse that says "yes this is a known issue and here is what Netgear/Samsung recommends" or a simple answer that says "yup known issue cant be fixed".
Jeff S.
P.S. ORBI believer - I've helped to install 3 or 4 ORBI networks at friends houses. COSTCO usually ha
25 Replies
I have had my Galaxy Tab S2 v7.0 and Samsung S8 latest OS and have not seen this with my two Orbi systems. Sounds like this is a Samsung issue that you should post about in there forums for make contact with Samsung support. It's up to Samsung and there support to ensure there devices work on various wifi systems.
I have owned every Samsung Galaxy phone since the very first one. I also have customers with Orbi setups who use Samsung Galaxy phones. Currently we have 3 S10+ and 1 S20. I have never experienced this problem on the Orbi or any other WIFI network. Your years in IT should tell you this is related to settings or some app on the device.
This might also happen if you use a fixed IP address on the device, causing an IP conflict or you possible have a weak WIFI signal at the time of the disconnect.
Check to see if your phone is set to DHCP. Auto connect should kick in as soon as you have a decent WIFI signal.
The tons of posts about this problem, does not mean it is an Orbi problem, as Orbi's WIFI system does not care what device connects to it as long as it is compatible and has the proper credentials.
If tons of other people are having similiar issues then one would think Netgear might investigate the issue...to keep current customers happy and to fix problems that future customers may have. I tried all the settings with ORBI including DHCP and static IPs and I worked with Samsung support in the past. Samsung sells 296 million phones per year for 2019 - they could care less if it has issues with one vendors router.
Jeff S.
Also if your Samsung Galaxy S* cellphones do not have authentication issues with your RBS50/RBR50s. What carrier do you use - I use ATT. Please share sceen shots of your most common router settings. Are you using any of these settings: (I lose too much speed using these except Fast Roaming which isnt a speed setting)
- Enable Implicit BEAMFORMING - Boosts WiFi speed, reliability, & range for all mobile devices - Enable MU-MIMO - Enable Fast Roaming
- I have Samsung Galaxy S10+ with this same issue. It costs me overages on Verizon because I don't know it stopped connecting to my network.
- I have this issue with my S10 as well. Other than that the Orbi works great. Frustrating. And I agree that I'm tired of hearing the factory reset advice
The dreaded Samsung Galaxy WIFI authentication error is not an Orbi issue but a known Galaxy S series issue. The fix is usually remedied by following some of these Samsung suggestions:
Restart the phone
Forget phone wifi
Reset phone network settings
Toggle phone Airplane Mode on and off
Wipe phone cache partition
Install phone updates
Check for bad phone apps
If all else fails Factory reset phone.
You can find instructions on how to perform these tasks by searching the net.
I have the same issue on my Galaxy A71, and I am using an Ubiquiti Unifi network, consisting of a UDM and a UAP IW-HD.
I find turning off and, on the Wi-Fi, usually fixes this. It's nothing to do with DHCP leases or the network configuration as when this issue occurs I can easily connect to another WLAN I have set up with identical radio and authentication settings to my main home network, it's just on a different VLAN.
Try this bandaid... I dont notice the pain anymore of my cellphone with stuck "needs authentication" wifi
What I have found that helped to reduce the pain is: install "Wifi Automatic" by j4elin from the Google Play store.
In the App settings I used:
Turn Wifi on...
- When the device is unlocked
Turn Wifi off when...
- Screen is off (for at least 10 mins)
Also in you phone Wifi settings... the 3 dots - where you can go into your wifi advanced settings:
"Switch to mobile data" - On
"Turn on WI-Fi automatically" - On
It takes away some of the stuck "needs authentication" Wifi issues... where you get no data flowing to your phone until you reset your wifi
I've been running into this for a while - can't remember when it started. What's odd, like so many others, is that it's just one device - my Samsung Note10; my wife's Samsung S10 has been fine.
After resetting my phone and my router (to factory defaults) and no change, I really set out to verify that my existing network was really gone / reset. This took a bit longer than I would have expected and through some states that I'm not able to recreate, particularly, at one point it was auto-reconnecting to my router with a message that said "Connected via Orbi" instead of just "Connected".
Anyway, part of the key to getting where I am now was turning off "Auto-Reconnect" before trying to remove the network. Then a bunch of delete, add, turn off auto-reconnect, turn off wi-fi, turn back on wi-fi, delete connection, restart phone...maybe 2 or 3 (or 5) times in a row. For good measure, I removed the Orbi app after the 1st or 2nd restart of my phone, then re-installed after the 3rd or 4th restart.
There were at least 2 or 3 times where I had "deleted" my connection, only for the phone to find and automatically connect to my network on resetart. I'm really not sure where this was coming from, but when this happened, I definitely was seeing "Connected via Orbi" for the connection.
My phone's now showing just "connected" (no "via Orbi") with a 650 Mbps network speed and no authentication errors that I've noticed since this afternoon, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there was some sort of weird interaction between Samsung and the Orbi software that's now been broken (for better or worse? At least no authentication errors, so at least that part's better.)
I'll update if the problem comes back, but I'm feeling good that my previous attempts to "reset wifi" weren't successful at really getting me to a fresh restart, hence why following that advice (forget, then reconnect) didn't seem to fix my problem more than temporarily.
Update - day two: Still working.
I'm starting to believe that there are several things that are happening and there's a certain amount of "bad luck" that has to happen when you add your Wi-Fi network to your phone. If you happen to get a "bad" connection during setup, it will give you the intermittent "authentication" problem until you forget the connection. However, you have a certain percentage chance of getting this "bad" connection setup each time you try, so just like flipping a coin, where you can get 10 heads in a row, you can get another bad connection after forgetting / re-adding, so the key is to keep removing / re-adding the network until the problem goes away. It's fairly likely that forgetting and re-adding once or twice or three times won't be enough.
The main take away is, "If first you don't succeed, try, try, (try, try, try, try...) again."
I just wish it was more definite than that, and I wish I had some understanding of what can be done to have a better chance of getting a "good" connection from the start. I wish there was a good way of getting Samsung to put in the work to identify and fix the problem. I wish...I had million dollars. :-)
I've seen a similar issue with file transfers using encryption where there was a mismatch in the implementation of the algorithm negotiated for security. In this case, IF a particular algorithm picked and AND the data just happened to have a certain special character then negotiation failed, and, therefore, the authentication failed, but if the data in the negotiation didn't have the special character then it worked. However, in that case, this was happening on a server where I had verbose debugging information and could see all the details. Unfortunately, the issue was deep in some 3rd party drivers that I had no control over, but, fortunately, the remote vendor changed protocols and the new algorithms in the new protocol were much more reliable.
Working backwards from what I'm seeing, it's almost as if Samsung caches which algorithm was successful in negotiation at the time of setup (maybe to save time on subsequent connections? Maybe it only advertises that one "good" algorithm as compatible?) and unfortunately picks one that's not reliably successful but just happens to work on that first try. What doesn't feel right to me is why that wouldn't be renegotiated fully each time or how it would ever settle on a better algorithm. Without logging tools to see exactly where and why the "authentication" is failing, as well as what algorithm was used, it's going to hard to collect any useful evidence to present to Samsung. Anyone know of an easy, non-root, way to add this level of debugging to the Android wi-fi connection?
Regardless, don't settle on "I tried the forget / re-add on my phone and it didn't fix the problem." because it might take many times to get it right - at least, that's how it's looking for me. Again, I'll update in a few more days, just to see if the "fix" sticks.
Is there a way to get more detailed logs out of Orbi than what is in the web UI administration area?
When the device actually connects, the log will show that an IP assignment was made via DHCP. However, there is nothing in the log showing the detail of a device attempting to join.
I have these same problems of "couldn't authenticate connection". If we could see detailed protocol logs we could probably figure out what is actually going on here.
