Poor WiFi on Mini

[SusanK]

I bought an iPad mini in May. During personal setup mini dropped signal several times. Blue shirt insisted it was the store connection not the mini.

I exchanged for another unit a few days later. Same deal. Weak signal, dropped connections. At hotspots I'm the person walking around trying to get on or back on WiFi.

At home I sit near the AirPort Extreme to get strong signal. My kitchen is about 35 feet from AE. I use an Acer netbook to stay on WiFi. Sitting in this exact same spot there are no issues with MBA, iPad Touch 4g, iBook G4 (11 years old).

The iPad mini is the only device that drops the connection here.

Does your iPad mini have an acceptable signal strength? I'm in warranty but prefer not to keep changing out devices if it is inherently weak on the Wi Fi.

Thanks for reading.

 

[thegreati]

I've handled a large amount of Minis in the past few months and found the WIFI strength was a little below what you would receive from something like an iPad 2-4 would. Where I would see 10-12 local networks I would see 5-8 on the Minis. The WIFI Antennas on Minis are just slightly smaller than the iPad 2-4 generations. I am not exactly sure if that would make a difference, but I've just always seen Minis to have weaker WIFI signal.

I'd request a swap with Apple for good measure but if the issue still continues you may simply just have to take what you can get at this point.

Best of Luck!

(Edit: One thing to be considered is the amount of devices on the networks you are attempted to connect to. This can also play a huge part in the bandwidth and signal received.)