Tl Dr: Macbook M1 connects to new AP, drops after 5-10 mins keeps reconnecting and dropping for 5 mins then stabilizes for another 5 minutes snd then repeats the same behavior forever. Anybody have any ideas whats the issue?

I recently got a new Netgear WAX220 AP for my home network with a router as a mini pc with 2.5gbe intel i225-V NICs running opnsense

I was using Netgear WNDR4500 with DDWRT before WAX220 and it was giving 100mbps wifi with full coverage of my small apartment. Which is pretty good for 10+ year old hardware

The new AP works even better on all of my devices including android phones, TV, IoT devices…

Except for a Macbook Pro M1, it connects but drops after 5 minutes of use, and keeps connecting and dropping for a while until it stabilizes again. Then it drops after another 5-10 minutes and keeps doing the same thing forever.

I tried different power adapter of AP, different ethernet cable, different SSID names, different channels, 2.4ghz, 5ghz, WPA2, WPA3, wifi6 (ax) disabled, using the macbook literally next to the AP, limiting speed to 10mbps and so on.

Unfortunately I don’t have any other Apple device so not sure if its specific to Apple Products

The old AP is still in the network and macbook can connect to it and use it without a problem. I want to get rid of the old AP and use the new one but this is one of the weirdest behaviors I have ever seen in networking.

Macbook gets the same DHCP lease and same IP from both old and new AP. It still fails to connect when I take out the old AP from the network. So I assume its not related to IP conflict or DHCP issues

Anyone has any ideas how to resolve this or seen something similar?