Renew lease ...wifi..

Ok, I'm an I.T. Professional. But what I'm about to say makes No Sense to me at all. But seemed to work. I read apple suggestions about turning auto brightness off, and setting the brightness no lower than a 1/4 but totally ignored it as that just didn't fly for me so I ignored it. My wifi signal on the ipad is just horrible. I have a iPad 3G 64 gb. I haven't used the 3 g yet. Had it for almost 2 weeks now and was having the same issues you described. After waking from sleep, I had to renew the lease, or turn the wifi off then back on for it to reconnect to my wifi. I have numerous wifi devices on my network. All working flawless. Including iPhone, iMac. Called Apple support and they also agreed and my new iPad should be here tomorrow. Well since I had to wait a few days for my replacement, I figured I'd troubleshoot some more. Well, would you know that after changing the auto brightness to off, and turning the brightness to about the half way point, my wifi connection issues have all but disappeared? I've even turned the settings back to the way I had it just to get it to stop working again, and after 2 days, still no issues with it connecting after waking from sleep. But my wifi signal on the iPad seems very very weak or intermittent which is why I'm still exchanging it. Check out apple support website for iPad and try the suggestions. If you know your router is good and your network is setup correctly, I'd ignore those suggestions and just deal with the settings in the iPad.

Apple has announced they are working on a software release that will address "remaining wifi issues". Hopefully this is one they are addressing.

No date has been announced yet for the update.

I have maintained, and still maintain, that the software written for power-saving, hence battery preservation, is the reason we are having weak signals, and lease renewal issues.

I am not an engineer or I.T. person, but logic suggests that to get 10 hours from such a device, that it has to throttle-down the wi-fi radio antenna, and other power-using devices in the unit.

The reason that changing the screen brightness works is because it somehow effects the power-saving software algorhythm, in a way that prevents the intermittent wi-fi connectivity issues. IMHO, as stated before!

My understanding is shouldn't stay connected, but should automatically re-connect. I've tested my iPad a lot in this area. For me it works all the time. It certainly seems to be getting a new lease each time it wakes up. The only ambiguity in my statement is the fact that occasionally - really rarely -it has the same IP address after waking up. Since my router has only fixed 24 hour leases, and I can;t query the iPAd about what it thinks the length of the lease is, I can't be sure that it always is doing so.

I'm quite sure it's getting a new lease each time as I've had mine in for 8 days without turning it off, running the battery down to calibrate - and it never failed to re-connect.

Having said that, there clearly are problems in some machines, and quite reasonably & correctly is driving folks up the wall.

I too suspect that power management is somehow part of the problem. But I also think there possibly are other issues like loose conformance of standards in some routers etc.

I'm suspicious that the problem might be similar to ones I've seen during my professional life, where several hardware components interact. Each is within its spec but near the margin of being in spec, such that the combination isn't accounted for and the software doesn't handle the situation - just a guess, but I've seen some really weird and hard to troubleshoot bugs like this before.

Steve

Ok, my replacement ipad came yesterday. I haven't had it a full 24hrs yet, but so far, I've had no connection issues. The signal strength still seems a little inconsistent when compared to my iphone and other wifi devices on my network, but I have none of the connection issues I had with my previous Ipad. When I wake it from sleep, it connects automatically with no warnings or errors, wifi bars do not disappear, and no random disconnects. Note: I've made NO changes to my wifi setup.I also have auto brightness on, and the brightness level is 1/4 of the way below the halfway point. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

I sure wish macfixit would take apart a returned iPad like yours and report how it was different from working units.

Wireless has a lot of power states. On, off, sleep, "polling", and transmission. WiFi cannot "throttle down" so to speak to save power. If that were true then iPhones would have the same problems as well- but they don't.

It can either be that the wireless is poorly programmed and Apple doesn't want to acknowledge it- hence blaming it as a user problem and not a hardware problem. Or it's that the aluminum build is made so that it inadvertently skews signals that are being sent and being received.

The iPod touch probably uses thinner aluminum for its backing hence no wifi problem. The iPhone 3G/S uses a plastic backing so there isn't any problems at all.

thats a good idea i am going to try that i have loved my 16gb wifi only ipad sence day 1 i really have not had any major problems except the further i am from my wireless g router say 20 to 30 feet from time to time my bars will move from 3 to 2 mabey a 1 every now and then but i can still surf the web.just about a week ago i ordered a new linksys wrt160n wireless router because i have been reading that they send a better signal and by saying that i have a 3gs iphone and when i am setting on my patio with wifi on in the same place the bars seem to do just like my ipad and i guess my distance is about 25 to 30 feet and one of the walls is brick so i guess i'm still a little confused about the whole thing.SOFTWARE UPDATE OR UPDATEING MY ROUTER!