60 percent packet loss with iPad on Eircom F1000 wifi

ma11achy

Hi all,

Have a really weird problem that I said I'd throw out to the community to see if I could get some insights into a problem thats getting the better of me.

I've got an iPad 2 connected to a Zyxel F1000 router which in turn is connected to Eircom eFibre giving me approx. 25 to 30Mb/s down and approx. 10Mb/s up.

The iPad 2 is dropping approx. 60% of packets and high latency (> 10 ms) when pinging the F1000 router over wifi and there is a very noticable slowdown when browsing and streaming video via the iPad.

Most of my data intensive systems are connected via wired cables and have no issues there.

I do have a smartphone (Motorolla Moto G) that is connected via wifi to same router, but no packet loss or latency issues.

The really strange problem is that the iPad 2 when connected to any other wifi network, behaves normally - no packet drops and latency of 1 - 2 ms.

I disabled wifi on the F1000 router and connected an old Cisco Linksys E2200 router as a wifi AP to see if this solved the problem. Encountered the same packet drops and latency issues with the iPad 2.....

I notified Eircom and they sent out a replacement F1000 - but having same packet loss issues with iPad 2 on new F1000.

I'm kinda stumped as to what may be happening, as the iPad 2 behaves normally on any other wifi network (even tethered to my smart phone).

Any ideas gratefully accepted!

Spear

Have you run inSSIDer (v 3.x) yet? There could just be lots of interference on the same default channels.

ma11achy

Spear wrote: »

Have you run inSSIDer (v 3.x) yet? There could just be lots of interference on the same default channels.

Thanks Spear, tried innsider and WiFi analyser, only two channels seen (wireless n). Tried changing channels also, no luck

ma11achy

ma11achy wrote: »

Thanks Spear, tried innsider and WiFi analyser, only two channels seen (wireless n). Tried changing channels also, no luck

Noticed that browsing is now almost impossible on ipad. Gonna bite the bullet today and trade it in for an ipad air.

Blazer

Have efibre as well and getting packet loss on all my wireless devices as well.
Wired connections seem to be fine but I haven't checked for packet loss on them as webpages load normally.
Takes bloody ages on our laptops and mobiles etc.
Rebooting the piece of crap that eircom call a modem seems to have improved it a bit so it's not as bad this morning.

ma11achy

Well lads, thank feck for lazy bank holidays. Looks like I saved meself quite a few quid on replacing what I thought was a dodgy ipad.

Said I'd do some troubleshooting again this morn with the work laptop and Wireshark (packer sniffer) lo and behold I saw loads of forced tcp disconnects, indicating something intelligent was dropping them. I twigged and disabled the firewall on the F1000.
Voila! Working perfectly. From 66% packet loss to 0% packet loss.

Now to enable the firewall again and see what friggin rule was causing the packet drops...

Try disabling the firewall for a few mins Blazer, (enable it again even if it works). Might be the cause...