Onn Android TV Box and WPA3 WiFi encryption

I wanted to let everyone know about an issue I found with the $20 Onn Android TV Box and the use of WPA3-Personal encryption in the WiFi connection.

I bought one of these boxes to gracefully handle surround sound being on for a 2010 HDTV that the Roku Ultra LT could not detect Dolby Digital support from the TVs HDMI port, resulting in no sound output. After discovering that my Google Chromecast 2020 WOULD play sound on a older non surround sound TV set, I bought one of these boxes to gracefully handle surround sound being on for a 2010 HDTV.

I downloaded an app from the Google Play Store called analiti. This utility performs a WiFi speed test directly from the device so you can tell whether your WiFi is adequate for playback. I found out that the WiFi would not go much above 20Mbps down and up, no matter how close to the router. When switching to a sub-router that did not have WPA3 encryption as an option, I got 160Mbps down and 100Mbps up from the Onn and about the same from the Chromecast. On the 2.4Ghz band with WPA3, the Onn would not connect at all and the Chromecast reached 70Mbps down and about 50Mbps up.

Since the 2.4Ghz and the lower 5Ghz bands don’t contain any devices that support WPA3 on the main router, I changed those bands from WPA3-Personal/WPA2-Personal mixed encryption to WPA2-Personal only. An amazing thing happened. The Onn reached 300Mbps down and 160Mbps up in the same location, roughly matching the Chromecast 2020. On the 2.4Ghz band, the Onn reached 70Mbps up and about the same down.

Although the Onn 20220325 build of Android OS 10 had patches for WPA3 support, it appears that WPA3 handling is not yet stable. If you have or are planning to buy the Onn Android TV Box, you should check your WiFi router’s encryption and make sure that the WiFi band you connect to does not have WPA3-Personal enabled, even in mixed mode.

Overall, I am happy with the Onn. Hopefully, a future Android TV OS update will get WPA3 support stable.

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Thank you for taking the time to come in here and let us know about this. I don’t own one of these units but some may come here with the same issues. You just saved them a few hours trying to run the solution down! Many newer users won’t think to change the encryption on the router to wpa2 and might have given up.

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