Does the Asus Transformer Prime have wifi issues?

[jarodp3390]

I have been looking to get a tablet for awhile now, and upon seeing the Asus Transformer prime, I really became interested. When I started to hear about the wifi issues I became a little concerned about getting it. I was wondering if people have run into wifi issues with their Primes. I would really regret spending 500+ on this tablet to have the wifi mess up. I have a Linksys E1000 Wireless-N Router with high speed charter internet, so it should work well with my network, but I am curious to see what other people have run into. The release of the Transformer Prime TF700T and Asus announcing they were fixing the gps and wifi with the new model makes it seem like the old model defiantly has wifi issues.

Thanks for the help

[leeshor]

Welcome to the forum

The Prime does have WiFi issues. But for me they aren't serious enough to make me want to get it repaired. The issues are not related to connecting to routers or hotspots. The signal from the Prime is not as strong and as a result you will suffer more signal loss at shorter distances. that with the previous TF

Do far I have connected to 18 of my customers secure routers with zero problems.

[Rpatbarn]

It is an issue of range not speed for me. As we speak speed test says I have just a bit over 15 mbs down. When I have been at other locations however with different security/channel settings or thick walls in one case, I've lost the signal just two rooms over from the router (~50ft). While I'm not thrilled with that, it hasn't prompted me to return it yet, although I still have some time.

[mbo1951]

I have a Linksys e3000 router and my Prime works fine most of the time. Mine is in the middle of our 1705 sq. ft. house, so I am never real far from it, though I did take it almost 50 yards to our mailbox and still had a weak signal. Netflix streams fine.

Sent from my Transformer Prime TF201 using Tapatalk

[Imadroidgirl]

The current issues far outweigh anything to do with wi-fi.

Issues with wi-fi? no.

[rexluna]

If you read through the entire forum, one thing emerges regarding wifi. It is not up to scratch.

Either people here have really poor wifi, or they have wifi that is passable. Not a single post on this forum has stated that wifi is good at a distance, and most report that it drops off very rapidly when you move away from your router.

If you plan to use this next to whatever router you are connecting to, you will "probably" be fine.

If you plan to use it in the next room, out and about, at starbucks or wherever, you may be fine, but there is a good chance that the connection will have problems on occasions.

If you ever plan to connect to wifi over the same distance that the original TF could manage, or at the distances that many other cheaper devices have no problem with, maybe through a several walls or with the old router at your grandparents' house or wherever, you will "probably" to "certainly" have a problem.

The problem is down to fairly simple and well known physics. If you encase an antenna in aluminium, it will be unable to receive a signal. Effectively what Asus have done is put medieval armour on an Olympic sprinter. Being the beast that it is, it is able to do remarkably well at the start of the race, but there ain't no way it'll do the 5 minute mile. Remarkably, with two antennas rather than the normal one, if the aluminium were removed, it would probably have the best wifi strength on the market, however this racehorse is well and truly hobbled.

So in summary, there are plenty of people on the forum who say that the wifi is fine, however, so far I have not read a single post on this forum from anyone who is using wifi in any heterogenous fashion who doesn't class it as poor.

[rexluna]

This below, from another post, illustrates the points I was making above:

Weak WIFI on my 2nd Transformer Prime

I've been really happy with my Prime so far but I figured since everyone else seems to be having wifi issues I would take a look and see how it performs - generally I've been using it in the same room as the router, or on the other side of the wall from the router and it's been fantastic..

And here comes the but - if you move away from the router, by a couple of feet the speed -drastically- drops. I have both a TF101 and a TF201 and I done some speedtests in the same location using both the TF101 and the TF201; here are my results (I ran them numerous times to get an average):

Same room as the router / very close
TF101 - 16.93 / 2.76 (mbps)
TF201 - 9.72 / 2.92 (mbps)

In the hallway, not far outside of the room with the router
TF101 - 10.67 / 1.83 (mbps)
TF201 - 1.94 / 2.20 (mbps)

I ran these tests several times and in every test the TF201 does -shockingly- poor in terms of throughput, at least compared to other devices. The 2mbit throughput is totally usable and likely why most people are are not experiencing any issues, but if you plan on streaming high bitrate content over your network to your Prime you might bump into some trouble..

I have a dead Pixel and I am waiting to exchange it once new stock has arrived but after checking out its available throughput when barely outside the room containing the router I'm having 2nd thoughts on keeping it. These tests were run on ICS.

I've been using it pretty heavily at work for testing video streaming content (I work at a CDN) without any problems using our office wifi so it's not unusable, but there is definitely an issue that needs to be addressed.