iPad poor WiFi connection?

[Cakefish]

So my new Air 2 connected to my family home network just fine no issues at all when I was visiting and where I first bought the tablet but now that I've moved back to my shared rented place (I refuse to call it home), it's having trouble connecting. My phones (old and new, running Android) are having no issues whatsoever.

It is insisting that I've got the password wrong. I haven't as I've disconnected my phone and re-entered the password and it worked.

I've restarted the iPad, told it to forget the network and tried again but no change. Also reset network settings as suggested by Apple on their website. Nothing is working.

 

[sjleworthy]

how old is the router in your hom... er... i mean shared rented place? i only ask because some old routers only allow a certain amount of wi-fi connections before playing silly buggers.

 

[Cakefish]

how old is the router in your hom... er... i mean shared rented place? i only ask because some old routers only allow a certain amount of wi-fi connections before playing silly buggers.

No idea, I've never seen it. It's locked away in a room that I can't access. It's probably ancient.

I've just managed to connect it (not by doing anything in particular but just by trying again and again and again).

I'll have to keep an eye on it the next few days and return it before Friday if it plays up more than my phone or laptop. My 14 day return period expires on that day.

If there's any indication that WiFi connection is worse than my phones then straight back to Apple it goes. I'm not paying that much money to get an unstable internet connection. Unacceptable. Hopefully it won't happen again.

 

[sjleworthy]

make sure you nail the problems first before blaming Apple. the likely hood is your (possibly) ancient wifi facilities are to blame. maybe they're not too future proof. not up the the Air. cheaper and easier getting a new router than dissing your devices? what of your next device? routers are most cheap

 

[Cakefish]

make sure you nail the problems first before blaming Apple. the likely hood is your (possibly) ancient wifi facilities are to blame. maybe they're not too future proof. not up the the Air. cheaper and easier getting a new router than dissing your devices? what of your next device? routers are most cheap

It's the landlord that controls the internet not me, sadly. It's completely out of my control. If the iPad isn't compatible with older routers that's Apple's fault as my brand new Sony Z5 Compact has no issues whatsoever and is a year younger than the Apple iPad (going by release years).

It's been connected for the past few hours but the connection has been very iffy with frequent major slowdowns and connection errors to the App Store. My phone has no issues when I immediately pick it up and try connecting to the internet after the iPad trips up. Something about the iPad that's faulty. Could it be because it's a refurbished model?

 

[sjleworthy]

could be

 

[Cakefish]

It's working ok again now. So strange. I'll have to give it another day or two to monitor it and see if it remains an issue.

Hopefully not !

 

[Marshall73]

What router is it? The only issue with some routers is the way they handle dual band networks, e.g. they offer 2.4ghz and 5ghz. If these networks are named the same they can cause issues with Apple products which have work with dual band. Other than that, if the router is using WPA at a minimum you should have no issues.

 

[rigormortis]

are you saying its a poor connection or are you saying its rejecting the password?

wpa is known for having two issues.

one is when you wifi disconnects regularly like every hour or so, this is because the wifi router rekeys
the group key, and sometimes devices don't get the new key, and you have to disconnect and reconnect to the network to get the new group key

invalid passwords are another issue. this has happend to me with an amazon kindle 3g keyboard and an airport extreme. amazon was sayng that this was the airports fault, when it was a math error with amazon.

your password isn't used to connect to the router. its hashed into a 8 way handshake packet ( 504 bit key ) that tells the router you are authorized to decrypt network traffic., once you tell the router you are authorized, the router gives you the AES 256 bit group key that is being used for the current session and keeps giving you new keys every hour


if your having any issues with passwords use the pre shared key instead


go to https://www.wireshark.org/tools/wpa-psk.html
tell it your network name for example 2WIRE123
tell it your password, for example PASSWORD1!

click generate PSK

it will spit out the PSK , which is eacc8037b6a93536c30d44c68e63dce6106ad31255caa8623ec7400e3e212c4b

copy and paste the psk into any wifi network that is giving you a bad password, and it should fix it

if the prepared key does not work, then something is wrong. maybe its a typo. or maybe its just not compatible. the pre shared key should work 100 % of the time. the only time i could think of where you would still get an invalid password is if the person running the wifi router used non ascii characters (128 to 256)

if the wifi network has two different names, like one is 2 ghz and the other is 5 ghz, then you will need both pre shared keys. or you won't be able to connect to both bands