Telstra Smart Modems are fully compliant with Wi-Fi Alliance CERTIFIED™ standards and features. Telstra Smart Modem Gen 3 is our first modem featuring Wi-Fi 6 and WPA3 security.

While these certifications are a worldwide industry recognised standard and have backwards compatibility with previous generations, there can be occasions where a device has connectivity issues or causes degradation of the network due to Wi-Fi PMF.

Wi-Fi PMF (Protected Management Frames) provides additional security to Wi-Fi networks and increases privacy. It’s included in the Wi-Fi Alliance Wi-Fi CERTIFIED WPA2™ and Wi-Fi CERTIFIED WPA3™ standards and is required in all new certified devices. An increasing amount of modern devices require, or will require, PMF to be enabled for them to be able to connect to your Wi-Fi network.

This feature being enabled shouldn’t cause issues with a device not capable of utilising it. However, older or obscure devices that haven’t been updated can have difficulty connecting to networks with this feature turned on.

Incompatible devices should be very rare, but the Wi-Fi PMF may need to be disabled for those devices to connect. Contacting the manufacturer of a problematic device or upgrading its firmware is the best solution.

Disable Wi-Fi PMF on Telstra Smart Modems

  1. Go to http://192.168.0.1 in your internet browser
  2. Log into the modem. The username is admin and the default password is Telstra for Telstra Smart Modem 1.1 and Gen 2. For Telstra Smart Modem Gen 3, the password is the same as the Wi-Fi password found on the bottom of your modem
  3. Select Wi-Fi from the menu
  4. In the 2.4GHz and/or 5GHz tabs, toggle the Wi-Fi PMF to the off position or use the dropdown box next to Protected Management Frames and select Disabled
  5. Press Save or Apply to save the changes.
  6. You may need to reboot your modem for these changes to take effect, please wait at least 3 minutes for the above changes to settle.
  7. Remove the power cable from your modem for 10 seconds, then plug it back in
  8. Wait 1-2 minutes for the modem to settle and go ‘green’, now check to see if your devices are connecting. This is a ‘reboot’ and can often solve connection problems. 

Important: Once you’ve restarted your modem, it could take a few minutes to reconnect to the internet.

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