My Interesting fix to the problem: Redoing the home network.
This was at my friends house and I was helping him with unreliable connectivity on his Ipad4, even though other devices worked fine. As a last ditch effort we reconfigured his home network.
Orignal network had the Fios router in the upstairs family room (with wireless disabled) as we had an airport express (which created a wifi network) to stream music via airplay. This was connected to the adjacent Fios router via ethernet. From the Fios router ethernet ran down to his basement where we had a "switch" to connect other ethernet devices. I say "switch" as it was actually an old repurposed (ethernet only) Linksys router set up as a switch -- DHCP disabled and fixed IP address assigned so I know we didn't have a double NAT problem.
New network. We moved the Fios router to the basement which also gave him wifi down there. We replaced the Linksys "Switch" that had been in the basement with a netgear gigabit switch as there are multiple ethernet devices to connect down there. The only ethernet connection to the Fios router is one cable going to the gigabit switch giving us an internal all gigabit network
In the family roon we installed another Netgear gigabit switch (connected to the basement switch via ethernet) as we no longer had the ethernet ports from the Fios router's ports available. Apple Airport Express and Sony TV connect to this switch.
Forwhatever reason the other devices in his home had been happy with the old setup, just not the ipad4.
Now it works flawlessly. I can't tell you if it was the old Linksys "switch" that was the problem, or if the fact that it had been repurposed from a switch to a router that was at fault, only that it works now. Again everything else worked fine on the old setup except for the ipad4. (FYI, this is a DM series ipad4)