WPA on 2nd Gen 2.1.1

Add me to the list. Wow, I am really frustrated with Apple at this point!

My 12 yr old daughter just bought an 8GB ipod touch tonight with some babysitting money. She was SO excited -- and, I can't say I blame her. Cool looking product. She's going to be very disappointed tomorrow when she learns that wifi doesn't work. After trying to enter the password to my wifi network numerous times on the touch, I kept thinking to myself, I must be missing something. But, alas, after reading this thread, I see that Apple, once again, has delivered another poor quality product. Great concept/design -- poor quality/engineering execution. I have 2 Dell laptops, a PS3, a PSP, 2 Nintendo DS's, a Mac mini, and an iphone all working happily on my wifi network. I'm not a novice in this area. I have no intention of messing around with router settings to try to get the ipod touch to work. It should've been as simple as it was with the 3g iphone I just purchased -- enter the password and it's on the network.

Another recent bad experience I've had with Apple is the 3G iphone, which has extremely poor 3G modem performance. The phone isn't really usable as a cell phone. I'm on my first replacement; going for my 2nd replacement (3 units total) this weekend. After that, I'm going to have to give up and go for a Blackberry. Similar to this ipod touch wifi issue, there are many thousands of forum posts with people experiencing poor reception -- with no acknowledgement from either Apple or AT&T.

Another recent bad experience I've had with Apple is with a 24" iMac which I purchased at the beginning of the year. After 8 months, it stopped powering on. Again, a search through the discussion forums shows thousands of posts with people having the same issue. At least that was a quick/easy fix; although, I lost my computer for the better part of a week waiting for the replacement part to arrive.

Now, with all my family members, we've collectively owned more than 10 ipods over the years. Never had any problems with any of them until this ipod touch. Given the recent experiences I've had with the iphone and imac, I should've known better. Should've checked the forums first before buying. At this point, it's safe to say Apple is struggling with their engineering execution. As they try to grown market share and expand into other segments (i.e., cell phones), I think it will get worse for them before it gets better.

Hmm, hope this threads right. Anyway, an update from me: flicking the wireless switch on and off quickly five times or so works as well to get it to connect. So at least now I don't need to totally restart. Still a pita though. I did submit a bug report after my previous post.

Greg

Your daughter can still return the 2g IPT, if it has been less than 14 days, that is Apples return policy.

Of course, my daughter can return her ipod touch. Do you have kids? She's been dreaming/debating about whether to spend so much money on it for a long time. She finally made the decision to get it and was extremely excited when she brought it home. I may have no choice but to return it, but my daughter will be very sad. For crying out loud, 802.11 b/g is a very well established standard. All Apple has to do is buy an 802.11 b/g solution from a supplier and they get the chip and the software from the supplier. They could select a chipset solution that is already shipping in a billion other devices. They just need to integrate it into their product. How hard can it be to test this and make sure it's working before shipping it? Works just fine in their computers. Works just fine in their 3g iphone. Pretty sad, if you ask me -- especially from a company that positions itself as being technically superior to its competitors (i.e., their stuff just works).

As long as I'm venting about Apple's incompetence, I'll point out another related issue. I have Parental Controls enabled on each of my daughter's macs. Love the Parental Controls in Leopard. However, with Parental Controls enabled, my daughters can't get to the iTunes home page. It times out with an "unknown error -50" message. This problem has existed for many months. Again, many people posting this same issue in the discussion board. So, since my daughter can't connect to the internet to get to the apps store (wifi doesn't work on ipod touch), she tried to get to it via itunes, but couldn't (can't get to iTunes home page with Parental Controls enabled). Work around is to find a link to the apps store on the web. It will then launch iTunes and go straight to the apps store, which works. (Just can't view the main home page in iTunes.) This cost my daughter a bit of time/frustration this morning. Fortunately, she has a technically savvy Dad that can try to work through Apple's bugs.

I can only hope someone at the appropriate level within Apple's engineering organization is reading some of this feedback. Where's the pride? Where's the "it just works"?

Greg

Would you please send your posted issues, to apples feedback site: http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipodtouch.html

Maybe with enough of use complaining, they will fix things!

Done. Let's hope they resolve this IPT wifi issue faster than the 3g iphone reception issue. That's been open ever since the product launched almost 3 months ago. The difference is I think the 3g iphone issue is a hardware issue; whereas, I think the IPT wifi issue is a software issue. (Also, assuming they're using the same wifi supplier in IPT as their other products, they at least have a working reference to compare against.) Could be wrong, but that's my gut feel.

Got it to work! Very convoluted and random. . .but as I stumbled about, here's what happened to magically make it work. Maybe others will have similar luck with these (or similar) steps.

First my setup - SMC WGBR14-N router, with several Mac & PCs connected as well as new iPhone 3G all over WPA2 with a random alphanumeric 8 character key. No connectivity problems ever with iPhone.

Today, brand new iPod Touch 2nd Gen arrives, I get the WPA2 problem as mentioned here in the discussions, absolutely no luck when WPA2 encryption is on (yet the whole time, my iPhone w/ newest firmware connects fine).

Disabled WPA2, iPod touch connects ok. . .so obviously the WiFi itself is working. Now here's the voodoo that got it connected. . .

1. As an experiment I hardwired my MB 13" via ethernet to my hub and turned on internet sharing w/ WEP enabled and share via AirPort w/ new SSID name ("RWMB").

2. I went to iPod touch settings and connected to shared WiFi from MB after entering WEP key (used a 7 character dictionary word FWIW. . .).

3. iPod touch is on the net, using WiFi, no problem. . but obviously this is a pointless long term fix.

4. I go to iPod touch settings again, it still sees my main SMC hub, just for yucks I try to connect. I type in my WPA2 8-character p/w and presto, I'm on!

5. This actually seems to work, settings have truly "stuck." I configured an email box on the touch, and am successfully controlling one of my PC's (not even the MB, an XP PC) iTunes using the remote app.

FWIW -
a. My SMC hub has no packet shaping/QOS enabled (I toggled this, it didn't seem to make a difference).
b. My SMC hub is set to WPA2/WPA auto recognize on a per device basis (however, when in pure WPA mode, I still couldn't get it to connect to touch without doing above steps)
c. My WPA2 mode is set to "AES only" (vs TKIP or AES/TKIP).

Hope this fix works for others or at least helps troubleshot what is at the root of the problem.

-Ryan

Message was edited by: Chicago-Ry

mr kelly suggested sending feedback to apple, well i did that weeks ago and haven’t even had an automated reply to say they got my feedback, so is there any point in sending feedback, let’s face it apple have to know what problems there produces have better then us

Just wanted to add that I got my 16GB Touch today and cannot connect to my wireless network. I'm using a Linksys WRT54G2. I have to use WPA (not WPA2) to connect my old Dell (my main computer is an iMac). Both link up to my network no problem. The Touch, like everyone else sees my network (though gets a very weak signal, even six inches from the router) and is "unable to join the network." I bought the Touch so I could surf the net and check mail at home without hooking up another laptop. If this problem isn't fixed before my return policy is up, it's going back. But I'm really concerned about the signal strength, that Apple put an inferior wifi device inside the Touch compared to the first generation.

I noticed the signal strength today as well. Since I haven't been able to connect, I haven't really paid much attention to the signal strength (and have had no way to gauge the wifi performance). I was roughly 10 feet away from my router with a wall between me and the router and I had 1 (sometimes 2) out of 3 bars for signal strength. I was roughly 25 feet away with a direct line of sight to the router -- same signal strength indication. My wife's 3G iphone had all 3 wifi bars pegged side by side with the ipod touch in the same locations. Very concerning indeed. The security issue is most likely a software issue. However, the signal strength could be a hardware issue. As much as it will kill my daughter to return it, I think we'll return it before the 14 day window and wait to see if Apple ever fixes it. Today was the first day she really got to play with it -- she's starting to see how much of a limitation the lack of wifi poses to the device.

Hopefully, Apple doesn't pull the same trick with the wifi reception on IPT as they did with the 3G reception on the 3G iphone. On the 3G iphone, they simply modified the signal strength bars without actually improving reception. In other words, if you had -100 db signal strength, prior to the 2.1 update, it would display something like 1 or 2 bars. With 2.1, if you have -100 db signal strength, it will display 4 or 5 bars.

Hey Greg McAfee, I finally got my Touch to connect to my home wifi network (in both WEP and WPA2, no dice with plain old WPA) and it works great and not only that, once it's connected the signal bars went all the way up. I took it offline again and the bars went down. But once it went back up online it was back to full signal strength. Hope this encourages you to hold on a bit longer. 🙂

Definately a problem that hasn't been discussed to often. (Probably because people are having troubles getting a basic connection) The range on this thing is terrible and as you said, I don't think a software patch is going to change that.

I think it might be a hardware issue. 3 wks ago, I bought a new 2nd 2.1.1 touch, and had all the problems connecting to my LAN at home using WPA & WPA2. Last Saturday, I brought it back to the Apple Store w/ the intent of returning it. However, they convinced me to swap into another one, and see how it works. I did, and this one works almost perfectly -- for about a week, so far. A few small hiccups in connecting, but it always does, and usually immediately.

There's 1 small abnormality that I still wonder about, though. Even when the connection is working properly, sometimes the strength bars will abruptly drop to 1 from 4 -- though it seems to still operate as if the signal is full strength. Real flakey.

Like everyone else, I share the disappointment in Apple's QC on this one -- 2g is clearly not ready for prime time. I'm still not sure I'm keeping this one.

I am not willing to hold my 2nd iPod Touch till the last day any more. I had enough trouble to deal with it for the last two weeks, I am returning it tonight. I might get my hands on later if Apple fixs this Wi-Fi issue. But who konws.

Message was edited by: Dachangjing

Message was edited by: Dachangjing

I bought an iPod touch the day after it came out and have no trouble connecting to my router. The router is in my basement and I can walk all the way back to my garage about 100 feet and still connect ok. I am using a 3 year old netgear WGR614 v6 router with WPA and mac filtering enabled. The signal is not quite as strong as my iBook but is just as strong as my neighbors 1st gen iPhone.