Wireless Woes causing marital disharmony !

ZENER

Forgive the title but it'll become clear soon forgive the long post but the devil is in the detail as they say.

Last weekend saw the Bride of The Year Show held at the RDS Main Hall. A customer of mine set up a stall there to try advertise his services. One of these services involves connecting a wifi enabled device - like a smart phone - to an open access point to print off photos.

In the workshop the unit behaved perfectly with both Android and iOS devices connecting and printing perfectly. That was on Thursday and Friday evening. Come Saturday morning when everything was set up we set our phones to connect to the access point (A Netgear N150 Router).

Mine first connected and got it's config via DHCP - all good so far. Within a few seconds the phone disconnected from the AP saying there were other open APs nearby. Then the phone became possessed ! repeatedly connecting to our AP - obtain IP Address - Saving - disconnecting -repeat.

Thought - Channel congestion causing interference - Sure enough a wireless scan showed some 20 - 25 APs (all OPEN) using channels 1,6 and 11. So I set our AP to channel 3 in the hope it might help - it didn't. We ended up giving up on it after an hour and decided to try a different access point. We also had available a Three Mobile MiFi unit. The phones connected fine to this and we made do with this setup but with only our phones connected to it. Ideally wanted punters to be able to connect and see it at work but were reluctant to offer an open internet connection at our expense.

Sunday - brought a different Router (Belkin) full sure that the Netgear was faulty and that this would work - it didn't. Exact same symptoms, repeatedly connecting and disconnecting on both Android and iOS. Tried setting a WPA key and configuring a fixed IP config - no use.

Ended up using the MiFi unit for the gig which worked flawlessly but we need this unit to work with just an AP so it's important that it works in any environment.

IT's been suggested to me that it might be to do with the open APs offering uPNP facilities which the phones want to connect to because they are offering internet access and ultimately the phones want that.

Anyone with any ideas on this or perhaps even experienced this ?

Would appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks

Ken

ED E

There's a setting you need.



I thought iPhone had one about automatically removing slow networks, but I cant find it.

What you can do is enable "Ask to Join", that should do it.

ZENER

Thanks for the reply but it doesn't really answer my question. I have no way of "simply" explaining to 200 boozed up guests at a wedding how to configure their phones network access settings. Explaining how to use the printing facility will be difficult enough !

I'm trying to find a solution which I can implement at the AP end of things to avoid the situation.

Thanks

Ken

White Heart Loon

Try changing to either 1, 6 or 11, whichever has the least use nearby, interference from a neighbouring channel is much worse than interference from the same channel. What I mean is, an AP will cope better with something on the same channel than it will with interference from another AP 2 channels away. You really should be using a dual band AP, which has both 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz radios, most modern smartphones will then use 5.8Ghz which may have less congestion. And FFS, get rid of the Belkin, they make terrible shíte networking products.

ED E

White Heart Loon wrote: »

Try changing to either 1, 6 or 11, whichever has the least use nearby, interference from a neighbouring channel is much worse than interference from the same channel. What I mean is, an AP will cope better with something on the same channel than it will with interference from another AP 2 channels away. You really should be using a dual band AP, which has both 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz radios, most modern smartphones will then use 5.8Ghz which may have less congestion. And FFS, get rid of the Belkin, they make terrible shíte networking products.

Thats not the problem. The problem is smart phones are "too smart". They'll drop a network if they cant dial home on it.

OP if you want it all on your end the only real option I see is to have 3G/4G service feeding the AP. Block everything except port 80 to limit load. The receiver could fall back to 2G in function rooms where coverage is crap and it might just hold for a few clients at a time.

ZENER

That's what I was thinking given the "fix" we did on the day. The boss wants to try a different router but I managed to convince him that this wouldn't fix the issue.

As for the Belkin - it's an oldie and has a lovely burning PCB aroma from it after an hour of use ! It was the only other thing I had lying around here at the time, it proved the point though so it had some use.

Thanks for the replies lads !

Ken