Surface Pro 3 WiFi USB quirks

One bug with my Surface Pro 3 that's deeply frustrating on occasions is that if I connect a USB stick to the unit when connected to WiFi, the WiFi antennas are attenuated to the point they're almost switched off. Depending on which USB stick is attached, 90% of the time WiFi connection will simply pass zero traffic for around 30 seconds from the point the stick is connected and then kick you off the network and prevent you from reconnecting to any networks. As soon as you disconnect the USB stick (safely remove hardware suffices, it does not need to actually be unplugged), the antenna becomes active again - if it's before you've been booted off the network, you can carry on as normal, stuck downloads will resume and so on. Otherwise, you can simply rejoin the network. Around 10% of cases the connection stays up, but ping times to even local addresses are 2500ms and above, and packet loss is around 80%. At no point does the WiFi adapter ever disappear from the network connections control panel or show as disabled (unless that is done manually).

What's curious is that this doesn't start when the USB stick is first attached - it only happens once it's installed the device and handed it a drive letter. While it's searching for the plug and play for the USB device you can carry on happily using WiFi, so it's not a power limitation I don't think, and the issue still occurs whether on battery or mains power. Reinstalling and updating the drivers for the WiFi adapter make no difference.

Does anyone have any ideas why this might happen and what can be done about it?

Thanks

Sam

I haven't encountered this situation with my pro3. After multiple rounds of MS updates things have been working smoothly


have you tried changing the WiFi channel on your router?

Oddly enough when I ran further testing on this I could only replicate it at one particular customer's site, which does suggest it could be a WiFi channel issue. Question is, why on earth would attaching a USB stick be the only thing to trigger it?

Logitech mentions on their site somewhere that their unifying receiver could cause interference when plugged into a Usb3 port. Their solution was providing free usb extension cables to those that are affected by the issue. Not sure if they fixed with a revision to their receivers.

maybe you are seeing the similar issue with interference on usb3 with that particular wifi band.

Nah, multiple brands of USB sticks were tested, Lexar and AData, same result - in fact the only USB stick that showed slightly different behaviour (90-95% packet loss rather than 100%) was one of the four Lexar sticks tested that should all be identical.