My Xiaomi Poco Pad suddenly stopped connecting to my home Wi‑Fi after the router was unplugged and powered back on. The tablet shows "Connection failed," but it connects normally to Wi‑Fi at friends' homes and at work. Every other device in the house can still connect to the router, so the issue seems limited to this tablet and this network. The router is using carrier-provided firmware and otherwise has its default settings.
I've already tried forgetting and reconnecting to the network, switching between DHCP and a static IP, changing from a randomized MAC address to the device MAC, resetting Wi‑Fi and Bluetooth, resetting encryption and credentials, power-cycling the router, leaving it unplugged for 10 minutes, disabling band steering, adding the tablet's MAC address to the router's DHCP reservation list, removing the MAC address from the router's user list, and finally performing a factory reset on the router. Some changes allowed the tablet to connect temporarily, but it was disconnected again within a few minutes.
The tablet is a Xiaomi Poco Pad Global Version running HyperOS 3.0.302.0. The router is a Huawei OptiXstar HG8145X6-10 with Wi‑Fi 6 support on both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. Since the tablet works on other networks and all other household devices work on this router, what router or tablet setting could be preventing this specific device from connecting?
3 Answers
On the tablet, remove the saved network again after making the router changes, restart the tablet, and reconnect from scratch. If it still fails, check whether HyperOS has a system update available and try booting into safe mode in case a VPN, security app, or network-management app is interfering. You can also test with a phone hotspot; if the tablet connects there, that further confirms an incompatibility with the router’s security or Wi‑Fi 6 configuration rather than defective tablet hardware.
Try testing the two wireless bands separately instead of letting band steering choose automatically. Give the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks different names, then connect the tablet to each one individually. Also use ordinary WPA2-Personal temporarily, or WPA2/WPA3 mixed mode, rather than WPA3-only. Some combinations of Wi‑Fi 6 features, WPA3, 160 MHz channels, or automatic channel selection can cause one device to fail while everything else continues working. For testing, disable 160 MHz, set a fixed non-DFS 5 GHz channel, and use a normal 20 MHz channel width on 2.4 GHz.
Since the router has internet access and other devices connect successfully, this probably isn’t an ISP outage or a general Wi‑Fi failure. The router’s client list or access-control settings may have retained a bad entry for the tablet after the forced shutdown. Check for MAC filtering, blocked or paused devices, parental controls, an access-control list, or a maximum-client limit. Remove any entry for the tablet, save the settings, reboot the router, and reconnect using the tablet’s device MAC address rather than the randomized one.
I checked the visible user and DHCP lists, but I’ll also look specifically for access-control or blocked-device settings that may be separate from those lists.