In message , Bill
writes
In message , John
Rumm writes
On 21/06/2011 23:54, 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.

[snip]

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

You are not alone. iStuff in general seems to have difficulty with
wireless kit that other manufacturers kit has no difficulty
interoperating with[1]. I had to swap out a WAP at an office the other
day because none of the iPhones would connect to it. The laptops etc
however were fine.

[1] This may not be a "fault" of the Apple kit - they may be following
the letter of the law (i.e. the protocol standards), but they
certainly seem less flexible.

Turning off things you don't need can help. So if the AP supports b/g
& n, but you are only using g, then disable the others. Same for speed
boost technologies, jumbo frames and other tweaks.

You often find it will work unencrypted but not with WPA2. One option
if the kit supports it, is to disable access to the LAN from the wifi,
and restrict the bandwidth available to it. Means anyone in range can
connect, but they can't see you network, or use much bandwidth.

Thanks for this and all the other replies so far.

From his latest email....
"This morning I went to the Apple Shop at 10.30 am and confronted a
spotty faced youth.
I told him of my problems. He said he'd never heard of any trouble like
that. What should I do I asked him. I don't know he said.
That's no good to me I said. You could see someone upstairs in the
Genius Bar he said. It was then I realised that I was in the
Cretin Bar."

He didn't get much further in the genius bar, but they demonstrated
that it worked perfectly there.

We now seem to have established that connection improves (although he
thinks it's still not right) when he turns off his mains network
device. I'm wondering now whether these iPads have any RF screening
round the main pcb or whether the wifi section has a really wideband
front end? I've thought of taking some kitchen foil over when I go, but
that might make the touchscreen a bit hard to read.

He can't really afford to cable his house to be able to remove the
mains networking, so I'll try to narrow down his wifi as tightly as
possible. I can take another router over to use as a separate wireless
access point.


Also, if you haven't already, try different channels. Some will work
better in some situations depending on what else is about.

My wifi used to drop out in the kitchen at times, eventually realised it
was interference from the microwave, swapping channels solved it
--
Chris French