Wifi home router problem

[gluvox]

Recently, I got a message from AT&T that I'm near my data limit. This surprised me as my last cycle I barely got near 500mb. Since my bill isn't ready yet, I can't see exactly what it is I'm doing to use so much data.

To be safe, I figured I'd pull out my old router and set it up (D-Link WBS 2310). After hours of hassle getting it to work on my new computer, I wasn't able to get my Captivate to hook up to it.

My laptop gets on fine, gets a fast wifi signal, but my phone just says "Obtaining IP address" for a while and then gives up.

My Captivate gets wifi at work, at friends' houses, at coffee shops - but not at home.

I've set it up with no encryption, WEP encryption and WPA2 encryption.

Each time my laptop would hook up to the wifi but my phone wouldn't.

I searched some other forums and found similar problems with HTC phones.

Some answers say that D Link sucks. But that answer applies to other brands as well.

I don't want to buy another router only to find it still doesn't work.

Any help?

 

[alphadog]

You have tried with no encryption and still no luck? Is your router handing out IP addresses? If so and you still can't get one, i would assume there is something with the router. I have a 4 year old linksys that works no problem - I am doing WPA2 - my phone has also connected at airports, hotels and other open access points without issue.

Does your laptop get an IP address? if so is it in the DHCP range you assigned or is it a 169.x.x.x ?

 

[gluvox]

Okay, I'm a little confused by "the DHCP range you assigned" - not sure what this means or how to check it. I recognize 169.xxx (actually mine is 192.168.xxx) but if this is the key and you can explain a bit, I would be most grateful.

 

[anneoneamouse]

Same experience as alphadog - mine's a stock Captivate (a.d's may not be) and wifi works well. I'm set up at work, a vendor, and home (on an old d-link router). Recently traveled, and set up on maybe 10 or 15 hotspots, all without issue.

Is there anything odd about your home setup (i.e. do you roam while at home?), or your phone configuration (non-stock ROM, or some funky VPN tunnel installed)?

Likely problem is the router- is it set to dish out more than one IP? If not, your computer already ate the available IP. Is the router set up to allow wireless LAN?

Hope this helps,

AoN

 

[alphadog]

Okay, I'm a little confused by "the DHCP range you assigned" - not sure what this means or how to check it. I recognize 169.xxx (actually mine is 192.168.xxx) but if this is the key and you can explain a bit, I would be most grateful.

169.x.x.x is self assigned, so if you see this, then your device is not really getting an address from the router.

Before you buy a new router, try connecting a friends house; many mcdonalds have free wifi too. Make sure it is nothing obvious you are doing - like accepting the connection in the settings screen.

 

[Nophix]

I would reset the router back to defaults, and reconfigure the router. Chances are, it's holding on to some old setting and isn't properly issuing IP addresses.

Also, what are you using to connect to the internet? Some ISP modems will issue out a address in the same range as the router, and it will screw things up.

 

[gluvox]

alphdog - Please forgive my rudimentary knowledge. Where would I see 169.x.x.x? Where would I assign a DHCP range?

anneoneamouse - "Likely problem is the router- is it set to dish out more than one IP? If not, your computer already ate the available IP. Is the router set up to allow wireless LAN?" I thought allowing wireless LAN was the purpose of a router.

Getting even more basic, I'm not sure I full understand the concept of the router "giving out an IP address" There's an address that starts 192.168.x.x. Is there a way to change it? Should I?

There's nothing else weird about my setup. Although my phone is rooted.
I get wifi everywhere else though, like I said - at work, at coffeehouses, friends' houses, and my laptop is getting the signal. Shutting down the laptop doesn't help though.

 

[anneoneamouse]

I have a DLink DI624 router; here're instructions (for a DI624) which might give you enough guidance to check the things I suggested.

Log in to the router, select the "HOME" tab from the row across the top of the screen. On the left side of the HOME screen, the second tab down is titled "WIRELESS", click on that.

The top line (with an option to select) reads:

"Wireless Radio: On Off"

Mine is selected "On".

On the left side of the HOME screen, the bottom tab is titled DHCP, with the following text:

"DHCP Server
The DI-624 can be setup as a DHCP Server to distribute IP addresses to the LAN network.
DHCP Server Enabled Disabled
Starting IP Address 192 . 168 . 0 .BOX1
Ending IP Address 192 . 168 . 0 .BOX2"

where BOX1 and BOX2 are text boxes to edit in. Mine are set to BOX1 = 100, BOX2=105. This means the router will allocate at most 6 IP addresses at once.

I realise that these instructions might be useless, on the other hand, hopefully, they'll be enough to get you started.

Hope this helps,

AoN

 

[alphadog]

alphdog - Please forgive my rudimentary knowledge. Where would I see 169.x.x.x? Where would I assign a DHCP range?

anneoneamouse - "Likely problem is the router- is it set to dish out more than one IP? If not, your computer already ate the available IP. Is the router set up to allow wireless LAN?" I thought allowing wireless LAN was the purpose of a router.

Getting even more basic, I'm not sure I full understand the concept of the router "giving out an IP address" There's an address that starts 192.168.x.x. Is there a way to change it? Should I?

There's nothing else weird about my setup. Although my phone is rooted.
I get wifi everywhere else though, like I said - at work, at coffeehouses, friends' houses, and my laptop is getting the signal. Shutting down the laptop doesn't help though.

It might help if you explain what is plugged in where. You said you dragged out your old router - how was your laptop getting online before. Are you sure your laptop is actually using the router? How is the router connected to the internet?

All other WiFi works - other locations, so if the laptop works with your dlink, the phone should. You say the laptop "gets a signal" but is it online via your router and does it have an ip address from your router. What OS is your laptop?

 

[gluvox]

It might help if you explain what is plugged in where. You said you dragged out your old router - how was your laptop getting online before. Are you sure your laptop is actually using the router? How is the router connected to the internet?

All other WiFi works - other locations, so if the laptop works with your dlink, the phone should. You say the laptop "gets a signal" but is it online via your router and does it have an ip address from your router. What OS is your laptop?

Oh sorry. My cable internet is running on my desktop - win7. The dlink was sitting in a box after disconnecting it from my older, slower desktop. I also have a laptop that I had for my job that I don't use much anymore. If I recall, the performance on the dlink was spotty but I think I attributed that to the old desktop. When I got the warning message from at&t (I'm still baffled as to how I used 2gigs in 2 weeks when I don't stream anything and don't use much data) I pulled out the old router and set it up on the new computer. First with no encryption, the Captivate just kept searching for an IP address. So then I pulled out the laptop and that connected right away. I added encryption and the laptop had no problem with that either.

Anyway, on another forum someone responded:
"And you are sure you are not using mac address filtering on the router? Your laptop mac address might be set to be allowed (if you had filtering configured a long time ago), but the new device (the Captivate) mac address would still get blocked..."

Since the laptop had been talking to the router previously, this seems to make sense, but I've reset the router and reset everything that I could reset to no avail. Not sure how to reset the mac address.

 

[icebike]

Wow... Just Wow.

Please people... Blind leading the blind here.

Won't SOMEBODY (I'm looking at you gluvox) download and READ the manual?

This isn't rocket science. If you are smart enough to own a smartphone and old enough to pay for it, then reading should not be that much of a problem.

 

[gluvox]

Hey everybody guess what. I think I found the problem. Remember how I said that wifi worked everywhere else? Well apparently that is no longer the case. I went to the coffee bean and the Captivate searched in vain for the IP address, then again at the cafe. Thanks everyone for the advice. Now I'm going to do a search for what might be the problem with my phone. I didn't change anything.