WPA3 issues

I got information from NG, Seems to echo what you mentioned about clients being the problem. They said there is new data streams in the beacon standard when WPA3 is enabled, that older wifi drivers on the client side can't seem to decode this correctly correctly. This is someting that NG and probably all other wifi router mfrs have no control over. Seems this is a problem industry wide on the client side which the client side HW mfrs will have to bring updates too. NG can't give any time frame on any other fixes or information on WPA3. 

I presume WPA3 is still in development and needs some growth time from the development group who over sees the WPA seucity core code. They and the all the client side HW developers will need to get this all figured out. Probably will take time so seeing mixed mode and or any kind of full backward compatibility with client side HW will be in the future I hope. I presume some mfrs may not update any legacy devices as well. 

For now, WPA2 and AES is best for most current wifi devices for best compatibility. 

---

pkgadd wrote:

The problem with WPA2+WPA3 mixed mode is less with the AP (respectively the orbi in this case), but with clients simply not working correctly with such a network. Especially Apple- but also some Android 10 devices simply don't connect in this configuration (they can connect to a pure WPA3 network or a pure WPA2 network), fixing this will probably have to be done on the client side (in other words, it's not likely to happen). Netgear probably disabled mixed mode to ease their support burden, as it affects the most common wireless devices around.

 

Are there alternatives to mixed mode? Technically yes, the hardware should be able to run multiple AP interfaces (VAP) on the same radio, so one dedicated network for WPA2 and another for WPA3, with different ESSID (similar to the guest mode, just with different routing/ filtering semantics) and PSK settings. This would work, but it's obviously not the prettiest solution and quite prone to user confusion (why do I need to select two different ESSIDs and PSKs for my single network - which network do I need to connect to).

---