Losing WIFI After A Couple Hours

Get a diagnostics report from istumbler, netstumbler or similar. Look for signal strength, noise, nearby networks.

Test on another network

I not sure if you resolved this. There could be many explanations. But I have observed and recorded some behavior with AppleTV Gen 4, which in some circumstances would lead to your wireless access point (or something else), excluding it from the network. I have documented this at :-

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7455927

I will continue to chase a solution on that thread.

I'm running into this exact issue, after a long sleep the Apple TV 4 loses connection to the WiFi and won't reconnect unless it is restarted. Anyone resolved this?

Get a diagnostic report, test on another network

Hello vazandrew,

Why do you think we see this rash of ATV 4 dropping the network while they sleep? It seems they were working and now this pops up. Even tvOS 9.2 is relatively old now, though these users may have just updated; hard to be sure. And yet it continues to work fine for many (most?) others, including me. It certainly makes sense to try to diagnose a networking glitch, as you suggest. Although most users seem to have multiple devices experiencing no hetwork issues, and it seems unlikely that one of Apple's newest products would be extra fussy in this way. But it does seem like there may be something else going on, maybe some specific setting that makes these devices extra vulnerable. As I've suggested elsewhere, it sounds like they're not renewing their leases when asked, so the router is dropping them. But "it works for me", so these folks may have configured something that triggers this. Maybe a screen snap of the network settings would provide a clue. It's very odd.

Either you or Vinceassociate often recommends making sure the DNS is set to auto, so ATV gets it from the router. Could that be the culprit? There's not really much else you can mess with if you're using DHCP.

Could this be a region issue? Maybe these users are all in Europe or somewhere that requires shutting off wifi radios when not in use? This is just a WAG. I'm in USA. Are any of those with problems also American? That would rule out any possible region issue.

Cheers,

Di

I wonder if this problem of ATV losing wifi while sleeping could be due to the router turning off the wifi radios overnight or whatever. I know mine can do that. If that happens, ATV would fail to renew its DHCP lease, and tvOS 9.2 may be failing to request a new one when it wakes up. Users experiencing this problem should check for that in their router wifi settings. Just a thought... If they have to turn radios off, they may be stuck with throwing a restart until it's fixed; they should also let Apple know through http://www.apple.com/feedback/appletv.html.

Thanks for the replies. A little more context for my issue, I feel like this has only happened in the last couple months, I don't recall running into this when I bought Apple TV on launch day and the subsequent weeks. I've owned Apple TV 3 and 2 and have run both on this exact same network with no issues, so it's definitely isolated to the Apple TV 4 - I have never touched my network settings before this either. Another person in either this thread or another recommended I try set the Apple TV to a static IP and initially this seemed to have solved it, but it once again lost connection and required a restart...

Hello gtau,

This seems to have cropped up with the latest tvOS 9.2 update. In some cases, but certainly not all, ATV loses the network connection while sleeping.

I don't experience the problem, but my Netgear router uses fixed DHCP leases of 24 hours, and I probably turn ATV on every day, so I haven't realy tested lease expiration while sleeping.

Static IP should avoid the lease problem, as long as it doen't conflict with the router's DHCP pool. The correct way to do it is to reduce the size of the pool and assign static values in the same network, but outside the pool range. The hack way to do it is to use a high value and assume DHCP will never get that high.

If it really happens with a correctly configured static IP, there might be a more fundamental problem in sleeping, but that should affect all users, which is not the case.