Wi‑Fi Radio Turns Off When On Corporate Network

Modified on Tue, Jul 28 at 10:31 AM

Issue

A laptop connects to Wi‑Fi normally at home, but when onsite at the corporate office:

Wi‑Fi starts in the Off state.
Turning Wi‑Fi on from the system tray only works briefly.
The Wi‑Fi toggle becomes greyed out for several seconds.
Wi‑Fi turns itself off again.
The corporate SSID may not appear in the list of available networks.
Device Manager shows the wireless adapter as healthy and present.

Example from netsh wlan show interfaces

State : disconnected Radio status : Hardware Off Software Off

Cause

The exact root cause was not identified; however, the wireless adapter and driver appeared healthy in devmgmt. The issue only occurred while onsite and resulted in the Wi‑Fi radio being reported as disabled/off when running netsh wlan show interfaces

Resolution

Disable and re-enable the Wi‑Fi adapter from an elevated Command Prompt. Run these consecutively

netsh interface set interface "Wi-Fi" admin=disable
timeout /t 5
netsh interface set interface "Wi-Fi" admin=enable