Let me clear some things up about the WiFi set up. I live in a two story house with a basement. My primary router (which is also the DHCP server) as well as cable modem are both in the basement. My computer is on the second floor so the signal from the basement is quite weak and lead to slower internet speeds. I recently bought a new Linksys router for the basement and took the old router from the basement and put it on the second floor to act as a range extender. DHCP is disabled and it therefore does not assign IP addressed to any devices connected to it.
Now to the broadcasted SSIDs - the router in our basement broadcasts both a 2.4 and 5GHz signal both with the same name, so the device connecting can pick the stronger band automatically. The router upstairs is set up in a similar way, HOWEVER, I gave the 5GHz band a different name and disabled SSID broadcast. The reason I did this was so that I could force my MacBook Pro to connect to the 5GHz signal. It would always choose the 2.4GHz band because it was stronger, however I didn't get the speeds I was paying for on the 2.4GHz band and I was on the 5GHz band.
So here's a summary of my set up
Basement:
-Cable modem
-Linksys router
-Broadcasts two SSIDs, both with the same name but different bands
-DHCP server that assigns IP addresses to all devices.
First floor:
-Nada
Second floor:
-Linksys router
-DHCP server disabled
-Broadcasts a 2.4GHz SSID with the same name as the ones broadcast from the basement router
-The 5GHz signal is not broadcast but still enabled, so one must manually connect to it to join it.
Now that that's behind me, I will say that my iPad will only connect to the 5GHz signal. It will not connect to the other SSIDs broadcast by the router.
I set everything up about a month or so ago and my iPad connected fine with NO problems. It wasn't until I made this post that my iPad started having trouble connecting to the publicly broadcast signals.
Hopefully this isn't too confusing