Fixing WiFi Issues on the Lenovo P11 Plus Tablet

tl;dr – The Lenovo P11 Plus (and likely the P11 and possible P11 Pro too) don’t work well when you have Protected Management Frames (PMF) enabled. If you are having problems with the tablet, and can turn these off then this may solve your problem.

I recently bought a Lenovo P11 Plus tablet. I wanted a low cost tablet for general media consumption, and already being an Android user having an Android tablet made more sense than an iPad. The Lenovo P11 Plus also has a reasonably decent screen, sound (“Dolby Atmos”), battery life etc. and at £200 was selling at a pretty decent price.

However, I immediately started having WiFi issues with it. I could connect to my home WiFi just fine, but after something like 10-30 minutes the WiFi would just stop transferring traffic. The icon at the top was still showing the tablet connected to the WiFi AP, but every app just couldn’t access the network. This was the only device showing an issue, and I’ve got Macs, PCs, other Android devices (including TVs) and the usual assortment of smart devices all using the same WiFi.

I have separate WiFi access points at home as it gives me three hardwired devices covering the whole house and outside areas. I also tend to try not to the ISP provided hardware since it is inevitably built to a budget, and hence tends to not be very good. Having my own equipment also means I don’t need to change much if I change ISP.

After messing around with various settings on the tablet, I re-enabled the WiFi on the ISP provided router and connected to that. Everything worked fine, so I knew the tablet could work under the right conditions. I then decided to take it into work which has similar WiFi access points to mine (Ubiquiti) and found that it worked just fine there too. That enabled me to compare system settings and I found that my home network had PMF enabled, whereas our work network does not.

Changing this setting at work immediately solve my problem, and the WiFi on the tablet has been working ever since.

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