Q: Intermittent Wifi issues with iPad 2 and WiFi

I tried it and it does not work....

I have done some sniffing around with friends who work in major IT hardware manufacturers, and this WIFI compatibility with "I-Devices" is a BIG issue which a lot of people are chasing around.

The best thing is to see if your wifi router / access point manufacturer has a firmware upgrade.

Very often the "Apple fix" will not be advertised, because nobody wants the trouble of 1 million Iphone-owner customers making a huge fuss

For an old product there isn't going to be one, but I have just upgraded two Draytek Vigor 800 wifi APs to the latest firmware and they work great with an Iphone4 (4.x) and an Ipad2 (5.0). These access points are really excellent products, with good range, and great features.

It's obvious that Apple have done "something different" to everybody else, which has resulted in these weird wifi problems.

Yesterday I bought an Apple Airport Express AP. I was horrified to discover that there is no web config on it; the only way to configure it is with the Apple config program. This is outrageous and is different from everybody else in the market. It is an admin nightmare and also invites people sitting in the pub across the road to try to login into its wifi config screen... so you have to have a long password on that, and hope it is secure. Whereas every normal AP can be configured for admin access via ethernet ONLY, which means it can be administered from any machine on the LAN. It is going back today; I have no time for this rubbish.

Yes I tried that auto brightness fix as well, also rebooted the device to give it a better chance of doing something - but it doesn't work.

I've decided I won't be buying iPad3 on launch day like I bought 1 & 2, I'll wait and see if iPad3 suffers the same connectivity issues first, if it does then I may just go for a Win8 device. I'm also suffering the lost-Internet-connection-while-waking-from-sleep on my iMac while using Lion (internet is fine while using Snow Leopard) - so, as a new Apple customer I'm fairly disappointed to be frank. I'm surprised Apple seems to be suffering from so many network related issues on all it's devices ... not for everyone I realise, but still, enough of us seem to be suffering.

Just out of interest, which countries are you guys from - I heard that UK ISPs might configure data throughout differently to the US and that the problems may be related to Apple not reviewing the changes.

UK here.

Data is not configured differently in the UK

Data is data.

There are issues between current Apple i-devices, and existing non-Apple wifi hardware. See my last post above. These issues are much bigger with IOS5, but there have been various hardware related issues with the Ipad wifi generally.

The problem is that there is no problem with Apple access points, so if you take the thing back to the Apple shop and complain, they will always say there is nothing wrong with it. The Apple shop uses their Airport Express (or similar) wifi APs.

I was able to get my Ipad2 swapped for a new one, last week, (both had IOS5) only because its HDMI output failed. The swap also fixed the wifi but if it wasn't for the demonstrably duff HDMI output, I would have been stuck with it. Here in the UK, some people have taken their Ipad back to the retailer and got a refund; you can try that too.

Here's an update on my situation: 

iOS 5 seems to have basically fixed it...I think.  It still has a weak signal which it didn't use to have when I first bought it, but I haven't noticed any drops or forgetting the wireless network suddenly.  My kids have been sick so they've been watching Netflix constantly the last couple days on the iPad and there haven't been any hiccups. 

Adjusting the birghtness or turning Auto-birghtness off did not work for me. 

If the problem was related to anything quircky, I would say it might have had something to do with the battery level.  Someone mentioned on here that the iPad 2 keeps a lower Wifi signal to conserve battery life (not sure if that's true) but it seemed like with iOS 4 the lower the battery the worse it got.  Might have been my imagination, though. 

Otherwise, I have no idea how to fix it.  I run all Apple (except for a Wii) and everything (iPhones, iMac, Macbook Pro, Apple TV, Wii) connects without issue, so I can't see how it would be an issue with the router (I use Airport Extreme). 

I bought an IPAD 2 day 1 and never had this issue until recently. I travel a lot and I am sure the issue is with how the IPAD software works and is not a hardware problem. I found a plist on my system that I am sure got setup with data when connected to the last hotel I was in. I deleted the data out of the plist and the issue I experienced for 3 miserable weeks with my IPAD seems to be resolved. I will monitor this for another few days, but as you know the problem does not allow you to access the Internet for more than 15 minutes and I have been going for over two hours now!! If this truly fixes the issue I will post details and how to resolve it.

OK, after 12 plus hours and my Internet access is still working so here is what fixed the issue for me. Using iFile or like tool, navigate to /var/db/dhcpclient. There you find a plist named DUID_ID. I edited this and deleted all plist entries. Next I rebooted my IPad and it is back to working like before. I suspect that this is the file that hotel software sets to require you to renew your DHCP lease each day or the like. It either got corrupted or is working as expected and the IOS software is flawed. In any case, try this and see if it clears up your issue and post back.

That's going to work only if the Ipad is jailbroken.

Another post to share the same experience...

I bought an iPad 2 16Go Wifi from the Apple Store Le Louvre at the end of July. My wireless connexion drops after 15/20min and then it is a nightmare to get it back. The network is rather not detected or stay connected for a few seconds. Then the only way to recover my connexion is to leave the iPad resting for a couple of hours. This phenomen is permanente and occurs on every APs I have tried untill now (Wireless G or N) even at 1m from the spots.

OK, so what are we going to do about it???

Obviously there is a problem with Ipad2 wifi, as evident from 80 pages of complains. It is NOT a defective unit. I replaced my ipad2 *twice* already, same issue, right of the box!! The "genious" at Apple of course never heard of such a problem, and agreed replacing the unit after insisting to restore it first, which of course did not help.

So here are the symptoms:

Router is fine with latest firmware. All other iOS devices (iphone, ipod touch and Mac Mini) have no problems what so ever. ONLY the ipad has the problem, even after upgrading to IOS5, and only with routers requiring authentication, which is the majority! It will loose the network and forget it! Sometime it will remember it again after few minutes, or few hours, sometime it will ask you to select it again as if you access it the first time, so you need to reselect it every few minutes. VERY annoying! Open networks don't seem to have this problem though.

How come such a popular device has such a fundemental problem yet Apple does not know about it or fix it?? Does anyone from Apple listens to these complains? Is there a better way to get their attention? Probably need to get the word out to the media channels so Apple will have to do something about it!

They are waiting for our ipad warranties to expire....

Ipad2. 32g. Ios5

Had the same problem as everyone. Intermitent wifi at home with a d-link router which i can't access. What really bugged me is that if i was on skype talking wiyh someone, my connection would stay on. But read the newspaper or go on facebook and after 30 sec myconnection was out. I did two things and it works well so far:

1) set brightness at max and took out auto

2) set my network at static

3) loaded iscan lite

Crossing all available digits. An ipad with connection problem is worthless.

Sorry. Make that three things and it's ip scanner lite. Not iscan. Good luck.

My problem with the Wifi on ios5/iPad2 is with @home and with hotspots. It worked fine until a few days ago. It has to be Apple/Software related. Apple just needs to admit this and fix the issue. I'm not even going to trouble-shoot the issue until Apple releases an update that addresses the Wifi issues they created. There have been ZERO changes to my network in the last year, and every other devise works fine.

@/Ramyyan: Maybe if we all start to talk about the issue on Twtter. Then maybe Apple will realize it's a widespread issue and fix it.