SYNC 3 can't connect to 802.11r wireless networks

[DatWayMon]

About eight months ago I installed a Mesh Network in my house to improve WiFi coverage and boy did it work great. Immediately every dead zone in my house had excellent WiFi coverage. I decided to connect my BS to the new network since it had much greater signal strength compared to the old network it was connecting to, and everything worked great until one day it didn't.

My BS still saw the new network with it's excellent signal strength but every time I tried connecting to it Sync 3 would tell me it couldn't. I tried repeatedly over the course of the next couple of weeks but eventually resigned myself that all updates would now have to be done manually until Ford released a new update that fixed this bug.

So today I saw the new build release of Sync 3.4 Build 22200 and downloaded it to a flash drive and went about installing it. Once it was done nothing had changed in regards to my ability to connect to my new network. So I then decided it was time to do some serious digging around the Internet and I came upon the site I've quoted below.

Ford SYNC 3 includes an 802.11b/g/n wifi client, but it is unable to connect to wireless networks that support 802.11r Fast Transitions.

When SYNC 3 tries to connect to a network that supports 802.11r, it says “I want to use 802.11r” and “I want to use non-802.11r security”. That’s not allowed, so it can’t connect.

Source: Ford Wifi Is Broken

I then remembered that at some point after I had initially connected my BS to my new network I was digging through the Deco (Brand Name) Mesh Network settings and had turned on something they called Fast Roaming which uses 802.11r. So I went back out to my BS a few minutes ago, got into the settings for my Deco Mesh Network and turned off Fast Roaming and lo and behold my BS connected immediately to my new network. I then ran several experiments and came to the conclusion that Ford Sync 3.x absolutely won't connect to a network using 802.11r. You can turn it on after the Sync 3.x Module is connected, but once the connection is lost due to say driving away from your home, when you return it will once again fail to connect. So the only long term hassle free solution seems to be turning off 802.11r and leaving it off. Which in the grand scheme of things isn't really that big deal.

So anyway, I realize there are various reasons people can't get their Sync 3.x Module to connect to WiFi, but since I couldn't find any information here about this particular issue I thought I would share in the hopes it saves someone else the hours of grief it caused me.

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[pkmed]

Great tips! Mesh wifi is fantastic as a whole, especially to get connectivity for some people outside.

 

[Meanderthal]

If you need the roaming thing, maybe you could connect your old wifi router in the garage and create a network just for the car out there. Then of course you have 2 different networks but if you only use the old one for the BS then it shouldn't be much of a problem.

 

[Econoline]

There’s also an issue connecting to networks that don’t broadcast their SSID, my mesh network doesn’t. I could make the initial connection by inputting the network name, but it wouldn’t reconnect when returning home. What I had to do was create a “guest” network that has a visible SSID, and it now reliably connects to Wi-Fi .

 

[DatWayMon]

As documented for Deco; “If clients don’t support 802.11r, they may fail to connect to Deco. When the Fast Roaming feature is enabled in the Deco app, the wireless Beacon frames broadcast by Deco will carry 802.11r related information. Some clients can’t recognize this information and drop this Beacon frame, leading to connection failure.”

this seems to say you can only use clients that support 802.11r if you enabled that on the Deco and since SYNC3 does not support 801.11r (and has no real need to), the correct solution is to disable 802.11r as you have done.

so seems to be working as expected meaning 801.11r has to be disabled when you want to upgrade SYNC3 software and since that is a very rare thing to do, it’s not a bad workaround to disable 802.11r only for the rare time you want to upgrade SYNC3 software.

Yeah, I'm not really concerned about the Fast Roaming feature so I'll just leave it off permanently. Since I've turned off Fast Roaming I've noticed no difference with any mobile device connected to the Deco network. If I notice something in the future perhaps I'll reconsider.

As for it being a Deco only problem, the link from my original post leads me to believe it's a universal problem for networks using 802.11r. Ford admitted as much in March 2017. If you're interested follow the link in my original post and it documents the problem in great detail.

I'm far from an expert in anything network related so perhaps the information in the link is old and I just happened to get lucky, but as the saying goes... "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then", and if that's all this is I'm a very happy blind squirrel.

 

[Dude]

Agreed. I read through the entire link you posted and looked for updates to the 802.11r usage with SYNC3 and agree that SYNC3 is not behaving correctly in a 802.11r network with the only solution being to disable 802.11r in the network when access to a SYNC3 device is needed.

 

[Dark]

802.11r is great for mesh networks when you have client side devices that support it.

Sounds like it would be just as easy to create an additional SSID on your network gear and disable roaming for that network alone (assuming your gear allows for it). Now you don't have to alter your existing network while retaining connectivity for your BS.

Step it up even further and block communication from the new network to your existing network (sometimes called 'guest mode' on consumer solutions)--it's a good security practice for IOT devices that don't require communication with other networked devices, just internet.

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