Q: Brother  MFC-J4510DW printer - losing connection

I have a Brother MFC-L27000W that was working fine on my home LAN until I switched from DSL to fixed point wireless. Then it started dropping the connection. My suspicion is the problem has something to do with the router, which is a Lynksys EA4500. I have a range extender on order. I'm hoping that will help.

In trying to solve this problem under Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) with a Brother MFC-J480DW connected to the network via WPS I had tried just about every combination and permutation of suggestions on this page. I landed upon the following solution:

1) Download the "Full Driver & Software Package"

2) Install the driver "Brother MFC-J480DW-CUPS" through the installer for the package mentioned in 1).

3) Use a web browser to go to http://10.0.0.10 (or whatever the IP address of your printer might be)

4) You should see the page heading "Brother MFC-J480DW"

5) Select "IPv6(Wireless)"

6) Select the "Enabled" radio button and check the "Prioritize IPv6 Address" box.

7) You can check if your printer is online by: Apple > System Preferences > Printers & Scanners > [your Brother printer] > Open Print Queue > Printer Settings > Utility > Open Printer Utility. If you see green, you're good to go.

YMMV. Best of luck to you.

There's hundreds if not thousands of posts on the web in general about Brother printers losing connectivity over wi-fi when they go to sleep.  We can print to our Brother printer wirelessly but the wireless part is between the computers and the router.  I connect the printer to the router with an Ethernet cable.

Here is what worked for me and my MFC-L2700DW with OS 10.10.5

From the Brother menu:

Network/WLAN/TCP/IP: BootMethod = Static; IPAddr=10.0.0.110.

The printer already knew about our Wi-Fi.

After several print/scan/shutdown/powerup/print/scan and several Sleep periods of both devices and the Macbook Pro on the same Wi-Fi, no problems.

The Airprint-Disabled, IPv6-Enabled combination did the trick for me, printer was showing as idle but wasn't printing, mine is a MFC-J480DW.

Thank you.

You can achieve the same effect by configuring your DHCP server (probably your router) to hand back a statically assigned IP address to the printer, so that it always gets the same address.

Thank you. I found a simpler solution. I sent the Brother back to Amazon, drove to Office Max, and bought an HP printer. Worked fine the first time, has worked fine ever since.