Worked great for the first two hours now seems like a bouncy ball. Constantly finding and losing connection. Really frustrating...
Yup, that's about par for the course. You can fix it by one or more of these techniques, and it will generally connect and stat connected from then on, until you wander out of range again. All of these presume you have the following settings in the phone. Tap Wifi connections, then tap menu (upper right corner, then tap advanced:
Keep Wifi on during Sleep = always
Best wifi performance = off
Auto disconnect = off
Things to try: (No particular order, and yes, I realize you don't always have access to the router for some of these).
- Power cycle your router.
- Turn wifi off on the phone, give it a few minutes, then turn on again.
- Forget the hotspot, then tap the list of auto-discovered hotspots and add its passphrase again.
- Remove Security from your router and use mac address filtering instead.
- Assign A static to the phone. (Contrary to what others say this is not a guaranteed fix).
- Force your router to Channel 6 or 1.
- Try other modes on your router: G, N, etc. I suspect most people reporting this problem have G mode routers. Post back if you are seeing this on N mode routers.
- Connect to some other router (especially one that ends with the word GUEST in its SSID), then wait a minute, then connect back to your own router.
None of the above is guaranteed to work. Especially not the first time. I've been locked out of my own router for up to three hours, then it just decides to work again.
And you can try the static IP if you want, but don't be surprised if the problem comes back again. I've seen static IP assignments, go direct to Connecting, Authenticating, Connected, and back to Connecting again, in a real fast loop. This is because its NOT a DHCP problem, its a WIFI problem, and some how related to encryption.
Reading alogcat, and going thru some of the code listings for the TCP stack I've discovered that there is a state where the TCP stack of the router goes into "Countermeasures" state, when it suspects it might be under attack. When that happens Access points get added to a blacklist, and then this loop starts. Even AFTER you get a connection and an IP, the TCP stack seems to think you are on a blacklisted router and drops the connection.
This is really maddening.
I've seen this with G mode routers for the most part. I only have one crappy N mode router and I swore I'd never plug that piece of junk in again.
Anyone having this problem on a 802.11N router please let me know. Save me having to buy a new one to test with, or at lease I'll know what brand to avoid.