the other day I noticed that my surface (which has been performing perfectly in every way) was only connecting at 65 mbps to my wifi router (AVM FritzBox 6360 Cable, FW 5.50). This, because I was having problems streaming my full HD mkv videos - which up to now worked fine.
after some testing, here are the symptoms:
1. my laptop, also running 8.1, connects at 270 or 300 mbps to the very same same AP on the 2.4 GHz band.
2. my surface sitting right next to my laptop in line-of-sight of the AP only connects at 65 mbps on the 2.4 GHz band. that is equivalent to only one 20MHz (narrow-band) channel on wifi N.
3. my surface also USED to connect at 270 or 300 mbps to the very same AP on 2.4 GHz, BEFORE the upgrade to 8.1.
4. the surface still DOES connect fine at 270 or 300 mbps when I run my AP in the 5 GHz band.
5. my laptop connects fine to both bands.
summary: since the upgrade to 8.1, my surface will not connect to my AP with more than 65 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz band. is seems it will use only one 20 MHz channel, instead of the 2x 40 MHz channels available to it. whereas 5 GHz works fine.
this is not an AP issue, since the only thing that changed is windows 8 -> 8.1, and my laptop still works as expected.
switching to 5 GHz is not really an option for me, since reception is practically non-existent more than two rooms distant from the AP and I still have a bunch of devices that don't do 5 GHz.
following remedies attempted:
1. tried different AP model -> no change. symptoms remain as described above.
2. uninstalled wifi driver on surface, let it reinstall -> no change.
questions:
anyone else seen this?
if I didn't change anything, what did Microsoft change? ;-)
thanks in advance for any suggestions!