WiFI keeps disconnecting and switching to another access point

[peteoheat]

 Posting both the problem I've been having and the solution I've found in the hope it may help someone else.

My setup.

I have a SKY Hub (not MAX) router that does 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi.

I also have Sky Q for TV and an additional 2 Sky Q mini’s for TV in other rooms.

With this setup, all of the SKY devices will work as wifi access points by default and it’s almost impossible to disable. Importantly, these mini's only work at 2.4GHz, not 5GHz

The problem

My wifi on my laptop would periodically (multiple times per day) switch between different access points and for a few seconds I would lose wifi connectivity and interrupt meetings. The switch would happen based on signal strength from each access point and can be seen if you start a command prompt and run the below command

netsh wlan show interfaces | find “BSSID”

This will show the MAC address of the access point you connect to and you will see it periodically change if you repeat the command.

The FIX

The router has an option that says, “Synchronize 2.4GHZ and 5GHZ settings”. This means both the 2.4GHZ and 5GHZ networks will appear with the same SSID. This appears to be a problem and some network adapters don’t like it. So we need to turn this off and have the different bandwidths advertised as different SSID’s and then only use the 5GHz network which will mean you only connect to the router itself.

How to

1. In a browser, access your router which should be at http://192.168.0.1 and login with ‘admin’ as the user and the password which is written on the bottom of the router (unless you have changed it)
2. Choose the ‘WIFI’ option
3. In the ‘WiFI Access Point’ section, if the ‘Synchronize 2.4GHz and 5GHz settings’ box is checked then uncheck it. (If it’s not, then this isn’t the problem!)
4. You’ll then be able to change the Name (SSID): on the same page for the 5GHz network to something different to the one for the 2.4GHz one. I’d suggest just adding ‘-5G’ to whatever your SSID was.
5. Apply these new settings.
6. On the laptop, switch the wifi network to connect to the new '-5G' one and I’d suggest choosing to ‘forget’ the original SSID from the device so that you don't join that.

After doing this, I have a very stable 5G connection, getting 200Mbps download speed even at the furthest reaches of my house.

BTW, I don’t know if the ‘Synchronize 2.4GHZ and 5GHZ settings’ is a default setting or was a result of my own tinkering! 😊

Hope this helps someone