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Forum Discussion
Nwagtmustang
Nov 21, 2020Follower
Nighhawk mesh wifi 6 some devices cant connect
I purchased netgear nighthawk mesh wifi 6. I wanted my pc to use wifi 6. In order to use wifi 6 wpa 3 needs to be used. When I enable wpa3 my Samsung TV and roku can not connect to the router. My next...
schumaku
Nov 28, 2020Guru - Experienced User
Nwagtmustang WPA3-Personal is mandatory for the certification of WiFi 6 since mid 2020. It's not mandatory to operate WiFi 6 however.
WiFi 6 is backward compatible - well, mostly. Not all clients are due to bugs, shortcomings, or lack of maintenance!).
More cumbersome is WPA3. If you configure the Nightawk Mesh to WPA3-Personal this is _only_ allowing the association of WPA3-capable devices - your Sammy or the Roku are most likely not WPA3-enabled, so they can't associate. The cumbersome point is that many - far to many popular ones - wireless clients have issues with the wireless association when WPA2-Personal & WPA2-PSK/AES. This is why the vendors avoid making this mixed-mode available on their access points these days. This is probably the missing point here.
No idea what network adapter properties you are looking into. On the Intel AX200 and a decent Windows 10, the adapter properties control "802.11n/ac/ax Wireless Mode" does define the highest mode available. When you select 802.11ac, the adapter can make 802.11n or 802.11ac - but no 802.11ax. Note that 802.11ax applies to the 2.4 and 5 GHz band.
WiFi 6 and Mesh does act best with both 2.4 and 5 GHz radios available on the same SSIDs.