Wifi update for P73— will Ax210 work?

[Usher99]

Hi,

Verizon offered me a free update to the modem/router and it will support wifi 6E. I do not believe my laptop supports that as ships with AX200 newtwork card. is it possible to update the internal Ax200 to AX210?

I did find that some had trouble with unsupported network card error if it had not been "whitelisted" by Lenovo or have the Lenovo FRU for some similar laptops. Perhaps Lenovo eliminated that issue but it wasn't clear. Others did not see a bandwidth improvement but no installation issues, which is puzzling. My old Quantum gateway modem/router only supports up to wifi 5 so at least would gain wifi 6 but not 6E w/o changing something. The $25.00 AX 210 sounds like a perfect solution if it will work. Someone must have tried this or at least have a good idea if it would work?

I see third party wifi adapters that plug into a usb port too. Any comments/suggestions much appreciated.

[TPFanatic]

People have done it on P50 and P51 which are older than P73. Read the success stories here: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-P ... -p/5073219

[theterminator93]

I put one in my T480. It works fine. Now that 6E APs are becoming more common, I've occasionally seen link speeds of 2.1 Gbps!

[Usher99]

Appreciate the comments. I even found a driver for win 10 that should allow wifi 6E.

[theterminator93]

FWIW, I never got that to work, for 6 GHz connections. Version 22.45

I reluctantly updated the T480 to Win11 and sure enough, it started working on 6 GHz then.

[Usher99]

Was this the Win 10 driver you tried? I’ve read that win 10 will not report wifi 6E is being used even if it is, as not natively supported. Speedtest should be better though. Thank you again for your comments.

https://dongknows.com/wi-fi-6e-6ghz-intel-ax210-driver/

[theterminator93]

I was using the official 22.45.1.1 driver. I wasn't about to pay to download it from that website so I found it elsewhere.

[Usher99]

It was my impression that the official driver will not allow wifi 6E in win 10 and that alternative driver should.

[theterminator93]

It is an official driver, but it was quickly replaced with a new version that does not support 6 GHz.

Some people have said they got it to work for them, but I was not one of them. Not for a lack of trying either.

[Usher99]

Thank you for the additional information. Might be worth a try.