Lenovo with Intel chipsets constantly dropping

[TRhymer]

We have a large rollout of Lenovo Laptops and the newer laptops with the Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 versions can't stay connected to our Meraki wireless.  Lenovo says it's a RDC compatibility issue with meraki.  anyone else seeing this issue?  it's causing major problems with users being kicked off constantly around all our sites.

[cmr]

@TRhymer we have a load of Dell laptops with AX200 and AX201 chipsets (or Killer equivalent).  We don't have this issue running 28.5 with reasonably up to date Windows 10 drivers.  What firmware are you running?

[TRhymer]

we are on 28.5 all around.. we have some MR36, MR33 and MR52 setups at different locations.. happening at them all..  the drivers on the machine running the AX200 are 22.100.1.1

[BrandonS]

What is “RDC compatibility”? And what Meraki models and firmware are you using?

[TRhymer]

RDC is the Remote Differential Compression..  this is from Lenovo.

Our APs range from MR52, MR33 and MR36 models depending on when we deployed the location.  running 28.5

[Ryan_Miles]

Doing an internal lookup I think I found your case and org. SSID is iHeart? Logs are full of RADIUS and EAPoL timeouts. Assume the RADIUS server is reached over WAN/VPN? Maybe there's some latency being encountered here and timers need to be adjusted? Also, doing some traceroutes from AP to your RADIUS IPs and I don't think I've ever seen 169.254.x.x's show up in a traceroute. Perhaps that's expected I just don't think I've ever seen that before in 25 years of running traceroutes.

Are there any issues on the guest SSID which appears to be using a PSK.

Also, looks like Support rolled your MR33s back to 27.x. Just be aware the MT sensor you have will no longer talk to any of the 33s as that needs 28.x. The MT can still talk to your lone MR36 and the MVs at the site.

[PhilipDAth]

WiFi has no "compression" concept, so this is not related.

Another common issue I run into is WiFI cards going into power-saving mode when run on battery.  They work fine when plugged into the mains.  You could try the below commands on a test machine (which disables WiFi power saving) and see if that makes any difference.

powercfg /SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 19cbb8fa-5279-450e-9fac-8a3d5fedd0c1 12bbebe6-58d6-4636-95bb-3217ef867c1a 0
powercfg /SETACVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 19cbb8fa-5279-450e-9fac-8a3d5fedd0c1 12bbebe6-58d6-4636-95bb-3217ef867c1a 0

[GIdenJoe]

Hmm that's funny, RDC has nothing to do with Wi-Fi but it is a windows feature and it is on the Lenovo Wi-Fi support page as being a feature that could be turned off for testing.

Power saving is usually a more widespread issue for Wi-Fi clients.

However usually client drivers can also be problematic.

[cmr]

Lenovo even suggests removing RDC if you have frequent wireless disconnects on their support pages, so I'd definitely do that.  Further research suggests it was a Windows 7 feature that never made it to significant use and is generally recommended to be disabled as it slows down file transfers on any modern connection.  It was designed in the era of 802.11b/g networks and trying to make the most of minimal throughput.  Enabling it on a machine with WiFi6 is nonsensical!