On 21/06/2011 11:54 PM, Bill wrote:
A friend of mine's new iPad 2 arrived at his house today. He unpacked
it, tried to connect to his wifi and rang me. Many hours ago.

I've logged in remotely to his machine and checked the router settings
all seem OK. It's a Netgear router on Virgin cable with wpa wireless
security set.

Another friend of his called round to see him with her iPhone and iPad1.
The iPhone seemed to connect immediately, the iPad1 didn't.

After a long struggle without changing anything, the 2 iPads appeared
with IP addresses on his router and sort of worked, but had difficulty
connecting to many things in a meaningful way.

Google finds many, many complaints about iPad 2's and wifi. I've read
through their support docs on the net, but they are all pretty basic.
For a long time the iPad saw the router by name (and didn't see any
other routers), but wouldn't accept the correct password. This seems to
be a common complaint. We tried doing it automatically and setting up
WPA manually as the security protocol.

I'm going to have to go over there taking inSSIDer in a few days to
check that his router isn't on the same wifi channel as a neighbour
etc., but wondered if anyone here had any insight. The ipad says it
supports a,b,g and n networking, whereas his router is only b & g but
some of the complaints suggest switching to g only.

He has got over the mains networking as well, which he needs for various
systems in his big thick-walled old house. Is this likely to interfere
with his wifi?

He will visit the nearest Apple store tomorrow. I've advised him to be
wary of being sold anything more.

So far, from a distance, I'm unimpressed. Can anyone throw any light
into my darkness.

The IPAD will not be the problem.

How old is the router? Update the firmware to the latest available.
there's a high probability this will sort everything.

If the router is so old that the latest firmware is still 5 years old it
may still be unreliable so NEXT try the ipad on somebody elses newer
router, just to satisfy yourself it works.......then buy a new router.

The alternative is to keep the router and pick up a new Wireless Access
Point....benefit being (so long as you can get a wired connection back
to the router) you can optimally locate it in the house AND get wireless
n, long range etc. I like the Draytek AP-700
http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/ap700.html and use one of these
instead of my 7 year old Linksys router for exactly the reasons you are
experiencing.