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I have a Macbook Pro 2017 base model with 2 thunderbolt ports. I just bought a Xiaomi AX1800 router for its 5G capability.

Unfortunately, my Macbook cannot connect to the channels provided by the router, because they are 36, 40, 44, and 48; while my Macbook's en0 channels are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 149, 153, 157, 161.

After a few minutes tinkering, suddenly my Macbook picked up the 5G wifi of the router, and when I look into system report, the channel it listed now includes my router channel and the interface is now en1 (idk why it switched to that.)

Several minutes later, my Mac went into sleep mode, and the 5G connection was lost. I tried SMC and NVRAM reset, removing and adding a thunderbolt bridge, all with no luck. The 5G can no longer be detected by my Macbook.

The router is not damaged btw, since my phone and iPad can pick the 5G immediately just fine.

I ran sudo networksetup -listallhardwarereports, but it returns the list of possible commands, with ** Error: The command is not recognized. at the bottom.

Also tried: sudo ifconfig en1 up, but it's still inactive afterward when trying to check with sudo ifconfig -a.

So I think, if I am able to force en1, then it will pick 5G again just fine.

Where do you think the problem lies?

IconDaemon
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Moses Aprico
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  • Does this answer your question? How does the Mac choose which connection to use when both Wifi and Ethernet are connected? – Scottmeup Apr 28 '21 at 17:57
  • @Scottmeup hi, I've read that and still have no idea what to do. – Moses Aprico Apr 29 '21 at 14:06
  • Which part are you stuck on, maybe I can help – Scottmeup Apr 29 '21 at 19:26
  • @Scottmeup hi thanks for the reply. I still stuck on getting the en1 up. en1 can pick up my wifi 5 router's channel. But it seems my macbook always use the en0, which has some missing channels. I can turn off en0, but even after en0 turned off first, I cannot make en1 active with sudo ifconfig en1 up. With en0, I only got 1~13, 149, 153, 157, 161 as supported channel, but I need 44 or 45 or 46 or 47 or 48, the channels which supported by my router (when en1 was suddenly activated, it can connect. But I can't replicate this behavior, I don't even know what I did to activate en1 that one time) – Moses Aprico Apr 30 '21 at 11:47
  • From the output of networksetup -listallhardwareports on my system, wi-fi has only 1 device which handles all channels. A couple of things you could try: explicitly call networksetup with it's fullpath (my system is /usr/sbin/networksetup) or look at the file mentioned in this answer https://superuser.com/questions/431740/can-i-change-ethernet-settings-of-mac-os-x-system-mounted-via-firewire : under the NetworkServices search for DeviceName keys that match en1 and under the parent there should also be a key UserDefinedName. – Scottmeup Apr 30 '21 at 16:58
  • If this doesn't help you might get results by opening a new question about enabling a specific interface that you know the DeviceName of but not the UserDefinedName. If you go down this route, make sure you specify which version of macOS you're using. – Scottmeup Apr 30 '21 at 17:01
  • @Scottmeup it's macos big sur 11.2 – Moses Aprico May 01 '21 at 18:40

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