Doug considered himself to be a pretty successful guy, having a 5,000sq ft home in Hancock Park. He worked long hours, but often had to come home early to pick up his kids from school as his wife traveled a lot for her job. Doug’s work weapon of choice was the iPad. He felt it was light enough to carry around the house, but useful and powerful enough to send out emails, create new contracts, control his Home Theater in Los Angeles, etc. His only problem with this plan was that his iPad always lost its internet connection when he walked from one end of house to the other.
Doug had an IT company come in and install one of those wireless extender things near his Home Theater, but it didn’t seem to help. Each time he lost access, Doug had to disable and re-enable the wireless card on his iPad to reconnect to the internet. Although that usually did the trick, he wasn’t sure why his iPad was still having trouble after the additional Wireless equipment was installed. He called the IT company back and told them that their equipment didn’t work. A Technician came in with his laptop computer and said everything was working fine. Perplexed, Doug had no idea what to do next.
At Technospeak, we are seeing this scenario more and more frequently as consumers look to replace their laptops and Macbooks with iPads and a variety of other hand-held tablets. The latest generation of these tablets now has a fast enough processor to support more robust programs and office friendly features like Skype support and Universal Remote control for your Home Theater in Los Angeles. However, there is one flaw that most of these tables have, including the iPad.
In a medium to large home, there has traditionally been more than one wireless access point installed to extend the Wifi signal throughout a home. When a Laptop or Macbook is passed through the home, it will automatically connect and disconnect to whichever access point has the strongest signal. Most computers can do this while they are connected to the Internet and sending and receiving data, so most consumers are not even aware that they are switching from Access Point to Access Point.
However, if you put an iPad or other tablet in this scenario, you will have a problem. The reason is that the wireless card in these tablet devices CANNOT automatically switch from Access point to Access point. Once the tablet connects to one access point, it will stick with that access point until the wireless signal dies completely and you lose internet access. This is true even when there may be another access point with the same wifi signal sitting 2ft away from where you are standing.
As the wireless signal on the iPad gets weaker and weaker, data is lost when the iPad network card is sending and receiving data. When the data is lost, your router will recognize this and try and send and receive the same data again. It will do this over and over again until the data goes through. As you can imagine, this would slow down your entire network as the router neglects the other devices on your network to help out your iPad.
Really the only remedy for this situation is to have only one source of wireless signal to cover the entire house. Then, whether it’s an iPad or laptop connecting to the Internet, the experience will be the same.
This was quite the education for Doug, as he didn’t think there was any difference between an Ipad and his laptop in connecting to the internet. However, his home was still too big for the Modem/Router that Verizon gave him to send a wireless signal throughout his home. Our solution was to install an access point technology that converts a wifi signal into a focused beam, allowing it spread wifi to homes up to 20,000 sq ft in size. Once this was installed, Doug was working away on his iPad as he had intended and was a very happy customer.
Want to know more about how we can provide you with a wireless solution to prevent those iPad dropouts you dislike so much? Call Technospeak today toll free at (855) 832-4775 or locally at (310) 410-8771.
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