WIFI goes out for a few seconds and comes back on
eddiefitz51
Enthusiast - Level 2

I have FIOS.  Our wifi occasionally goes out for a few seconds and returns.  Happens often enough to make me lose my data when playing online games on iPAD.

Any ideas how to prevent this?

Thanks!

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Re: WIFI goes out for a few seconds and comes back on
smith6612
Community Leader
Community Leader

Usually the first thing you'll want to try if your Wi-Fi is going out routinely, is to change the channel the router is using. If the router is using auto channel selection, this could be causing the router to swap channels while devices are connected due to interference. This causes a disconnection.

See this guide for a quick and dirty instruction set on how to do this: http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_support/networking-hardware/01-modems-gateways/actiontec/f/3...

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Re: WIFI goes out for a few seconds and comes back on
gs0b
Community Leader
Community Leader

Any 2.4Ghz cordless phones in your area?  Microwave ovens?  All sorts of devices can and do cause problems with WiFi.

You could try using a dual-band router.  There isn't much noise at 5Ghz (yet).  The iPad supports dual-band.  There are lots of threads on this forum that describe how to use a different router.

Good Luck.

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Re: WIFI goes out for a few seconds and comes back on
nj1958
Enthusiast - Level 3

it is most likely the dynamic ip address renewing. which is a good thing! it keeps hackers out, usually.

unless you turn your router off overnight, which no one would do, the ip stays on the same address for a long time. Eventually the system will force a change but again unless you turn router off for a couple of hours at least it will happen out of the blue. and everything stops, resets, reboots. verizon doesn't care if it bothers you and there is really nothing you can do about it and ultimately it is a good thing for your system safety.

but try to ask them why or what is happening and you will get no answer. took me a couple of years to figure this out and several dozen phone calls and one intelligent computer savey rep who had the integrity to be honest.

anyways, that could be the reason

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Re: WIFI goes out for a few seconds and comes back on
gs0b
Community Leader
Community Leader

@nj1958 wrote:

it is most likely the dynamic ip address renewing. which is a good thing! it keeps hackers out, usually.

unless you turn your router off overnight, which no one would do, the ip stays on the same address for a long time.


It looks like you're talking about the WAN IP address.  DHCP IP address renewal, whether on the LAN or WAN, does not cause any connection or data loss.  DHCP clients will ask for a new IP address well before the lease expires so the DHCP server has plenty of time to reposed.  The amount of data traffic needed for a DHCP renewal is negligible.

For the record, the default lease times on FiOS are 12 hours for the WAN IP and 24 hours for clients on the LAN.  I doubt this is the "often" occurrence rate the OP suggested.  Although if the OP can tell us that the problem occurs every 12 or 24 hours, then that would indicate the potential for a problem with DHCP.

This raises an important question for the OP: what is meant by "WiFi goes out for a few seconds?"  Does the client device actually loose a connection as indicated by the device's WiFi power indicator?  Or is a "pause" in data flow observed?

eddiefitz51, can you give us an update?

Have a great day.

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