No Safari communication, but connected at full strength

Question

No Safari communication, but connected at full strength

I have an Cisco EA4500 router. It has worked fine, but lately I have had a problem with communication to Apple products.

At times, when I try to use Safari to load a web page, the communication progress bar stalls and does not continue. No page is loaded and the device just stalls out with basically a blank screen.

The WiFi symbol is present and at full strength. I can get the communication back by clicking on the WiFi symbol, turning off WiFi and immediateley turning it on again. This is true for all the Apple devices. It does not happen every time or even a large number of times, but it could happen several times a day.

This seems to happen when I get the iPhone, iPad or either of the MacBooks out of sleep mode (I guess that having to put in my password in any of the products would qualify as coming out of sleep). I seem to be getting mail and I don't notice it in the mail or other applications.

I have a Macbook Pro, a Macbook Air, 2-iphones, 1-iPad, a Windows Vista Dell, a Windows Vista Gateway, a WiFi Brother Printer, a Nest thermostat and 3 or 4 other things on my router.

About the time I upgraded to iOS7 and Mavericks and purchased my iPad Mini, I started to have these internet communications problems with the Apple products. I don't seem to see any communication problem with any other thing connected to the router.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Posted on Mar 13, 2014 6:05 AM

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Answer 1

mirovaz

Level 1

0 points

Mar 13, 2014 12:38 PM in response to EricGAnderson

Glad to see I'm not the only one in this boat.

Having this problem for a long time. Same solution as you do. Its BIG frustrating and annoying thing.

iMac and iPad2 here.

TP Link WR941N router.

Anyone having the same problem?

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Answer 2

m-s-y

Level 1

0 points

Mar 13, 2014 1:07 PM in response to EricGAnderson

This seems to happen when I get the iPhone, iPad or either of the MacBooks out of sleep mode

I've seen this many times with Cisco's WiFi implementation. The trick is to disable your AP's setting for "WiFi key rotation". I'm not sure how to go about this on non-Cisco APs since it tends to be one of the more esoteric settings available, and consumer-level APs typically don't allow meddling in such minutia.

Anyway, this isn't about your WPA passcode, but the broadcast key that the AP assigns internally to your associated devices' sessions. The CIsco APs, by default, will rotate the WiFi key based on time, and also when a new device associates to the AP. Mac OS/iOS, for some reason, ignore the first key rotation packet, don't pick up the new key, and therefore need to be re-associated as you described, usually by disabling and re-enabling the wireless NIC.

Search for "wpa2 wifi key rotation" for more info. IIRC, this only happens with WPA2 and AES. If you have the option to use WPA2 and TKIP, that should be a good workaround if this isn't a high-security network.

https://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?peopleEnabled=true&userID=&containerTy pe=&container=&spotlight=false&q=wpa2+WiFi+key+rotation

On a Cisco AP, you configure it per-radio in Security -> Encryption Manager -> Global Properties

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Answer 3

Mar 17, 2014 12:18 PM in response to EricGAnderson

I have an analogous issue. This is with a new Airport Extreme, 6th generation, running 7.7.2 firmware. Once every 24 hours (I think in the early am), something seems to happen that causes access to all web pages, with any browser, to disappear. I can still get e-mail; the wi-fi stays connected, but no access to the web. The only way I've found to cure it is to reset the modem (an Arris TM822G Touchstone® DOCSIS 3.0 8x4 Ultra-High Speed Telephony Modem), then reboot the router. After that, all is well for 24 hours; very fast and stable connection.

More details. I had the same setup, same modem, same devices, but with an Airport Extreme, 2nd gen. (Mac Pro [early 2009], two iPhones and two iPads [running iOS 7], and a couple of laptops ). No problems with the old set up. The new Airport is dual band (each band has a different name). I've tried changing DNS servers (normally OpenDNS, but I went back to Comcast DNS); same problem.

My security set up is the same with the new Airport as with the old (WPA2 personal); even the same (long) pwd. Any advice would be most welcome!

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