[the real serenia]

Hello,

I've been dual wielding my 9900 and Z10 for more than a week now, evaluating whether to make the transition completely. There are a lot of differences in experience between the two obviously, but not all positive. I'd say
six steps forward two steps back in terms of usability.

However, the biggest difference that affects me consistently is the Z10 Wifi handling. In my hospital environment, we have no cell signal so I depend on Wifi coverage wherever I go. This involves walking between several access points throughout the day. On my 9900 I could just trust that it would always latch onto the next AP and never loose connectivity. However, the Z10 seems to always timeout and fail if switching APs. What's even more annoying is that after several failures in re-establishing, the saved network would disable itself and I would have to manually re enable, sometimes several times before it would successfully reconnect. It is incredibly annoying. Sometimes I would be in just be sitting in one spot and it would disconnect itself from one AP and try to look for another, fail, and then disable the profile again. I don't have time to constantly check my connection and re enable every few minutes, and with the 9900 I could just trust it would constantly hammer away at connecting until it found one. It's quickly becoming a deal-breaker.

Checking inter access point handover makes no difference. This was unchecked with the 9900 anyways.

Anyone else run into this problem?

Posted via CB10

[Crisdean]

Yes welcome to the club. Our company network Wifi used to work flawlessly and now I'm running into the same problem. Saved Wifi networks show a disable connection. When you click on them it actually shows disabled.

Not sure as to why this is happening but for sure is annoying. Also if I use a hotspot and logged in and lose range it will ask me to reconnect through the hotspot website again. My bold 9780 did that automatically.

[the real serenia]

I almost wouldn't mind as much if it would simply eventually connect, even if it takes repeated attempts, and not disable the profile on failure. I don't see any logical reason for this; this should be a user-selectable option to not auto-disable.

Posted via CB10

[LatinoLoco24]

I have encountered this problem as well, sometimes even at home. My PlayBook has the same issue from time to time and it's certainly frustrating. Strangely enough, there are times when my gf is over, and her z10 keeps disconnecting from my wifi network (disabled as well) and my z10 wifi is perfect.

Posted via CB10

[kill_9]

Could the disconnection be due to conflicting IP addresses? I have seen this a few times with various WiFi-enabled devices including non-smartphone, non-tablet devices.

[nickdollimount]

Definitely a good thing to look out for!

Another thing to check, if it's at work and you use your network credentials to connect to the Wifi, make sure you update the Wifi profile if you change your password for any reason.

Could the disconnection be due to conflicting IP addresses? I have seen this a few times with various WiFi-enabled devices including non-smartphone, non-tablet devices.

[the real serenia]

Both the 9900 and the Z10 are assigned distinct IPs. However, this is a huge hospital so I can't comment on whether or not there would be a conflict with any of the other umpteen number of devices coming and going at any particular time. I'm just a simple doctor who wants the connection always available, no questions asked :P

Examining the Z10 logs, I see various combinations of the following errors around the time I lose/re-attempt a connection: "failed to initiate AP scan", or "wlan_auth_fail:unresponsive_ap", and a lot of "skip - blacklisted (count=2 limit=1)". Of course, the 9900 stays connected throughout this

Definitely a good thing to look out for!

Another thing to check, if it's at work and you use your network credentials to connect to the Wifi, make sure you update the Wifi profile if you change your password for any reason.

[kill_9]

Both the 9900 and the Z10 are assigned distinct IPs. However, this is a huge hospital so I can't comment on whether or not there would be a conflict with any of the other umpteen number of devices coming and going at any particular time. I'm just a simple doctor who wants the connection always available, no questions asked :P

Examining the Z10 logs, I see various combinations of the following errors around the time I lose/re-attempt a connection: "failed to initiate AP scan", or "wlan_auth_fail:unresponsive_ap", and a lot of "skip - blacklisted (count=2 limit=1)". Of course, the 9900 stays connected throughout this

If you have multiple access points (APs) in the hospital you should enable the Inter-Access Point Handover and disable IPv6 for the WiFi profile. Another possible reason for the disconnects might be the APs themselves not fully supporting BlackBerry OS 10's TCP/IP protocols.

[big bb]

I have had the same problem, but it is my modem that has the built-in wifi that i have from my ISP that is causing it.

[the real serenia]

Ok this is royally p_ing me off. I've had to manually re-enable my work wifi profile about thirty times yesterday. Why on earth would a profile disable itself if it fails to connect? I cannot fathom what purpose that would have except to make life difficult for people. Is this a BB10 OS thing?

Sorry for the rant, but I'm going to leave my Z10 at home if this continues. Not exactly conducive to efficiency.

[f_d]

This is a bad design choice by BlackBerry- they did this on the PlayBook WiFi and it happens with e-mail accounts too!

Basically, what I see happen is that when the device wants to connect to a (WiFi access point, email account, possible other things), it tries to make the connection and if it fails, it retries 3 times, one after the other, and if all three attempts fail, the account or profile is disabled. I can guess that the developer rationale behind this was that if a connection was not available, rather than continually retrying and bombarding the AP or server with requests and using up battery life, it was better to just disable.. The problem is that in reality, radio signals and the internet are not 100% available all the time, and it is quite possible to see a WiFi AP, but not be able to associate (if you're on the fringes of coverage for example), or for an email server to be down temporarily for maintenance, etc, so while retrying first is a good strategy, doing it three times in a row and calling it quits is not.. If you're walking around a building or the server is down for upgrades, it's going to take longer than the 30 seconds that each retry attempt takes, so the result is that the device is always disabling accounts prematurely.. What they need to do is a "progressive backoff"- the first retry takes place right away, then you increase the delay before the next attempt, and increase it even more before the next, etc, so that you keep the number of requests manageable, and maintain battery life.. Then you pick a threshold: an hour, a day, a week, whatever, that you can't connect, and instead of automatically disabling, you notify the user that there might be a problem.

[the real serenia]

This is a bad design choice by BlackBerry- they did this on the PlayBook WiFi and it happens with e-mail accounts too!

Yes, after going home last night I searched and noted that the same issue seems to have affected PB users as well.

I've also noticed that some of my POP accounts show as 'disabled' once in a while, but email still is received despite this. The disabled account often spontaneously becomes active again without my intervention, which is what I hoped would happen with the wifi profiles, but to no avail.

If this is a design choice ,i agree it is a horrible decision. I'd rather have shorter battery life than have to manually reconnect to every network, otherwise what is the point of having push email.

[mooda]

I have been Running into this a lot at work as well. I have handover enabled but it seems that the OS has a hard time with the hand shake when moving from one AP to another. My 9780 just jumps over to the next AP the Z10 seems to think its lost its token then re authenticates. The controller won't give it a new one because it is still authenticated. Boom disabled

Posted via CB10

[dracolnyte]

happened on my playbook as well and later i found out it was my router. changed the security setting from WPA personal to WPA2 (the other one) and ever since then it always had a strong connection.

[notfanboy]

Has there been a solution found for this issue?

Our office building spans several floors and there are two WPA access points per floor. Throughout the day, as you go to meetings and such, the phone is supposed to invisibly connect to the strongest access point when you get out of range of your old access point. A coworker of mine, so far the sole Z10 owner in or office, has found this wifi disabling quite frustrating as you can imagine. I feel a little bit guilty because this guy was ready to buy a SG3 in December but I told him to wait for Jan 30 before making a decision. Any help would be appreciated.

[the real serenia]

I spent a good part of my morning with our IT guys to get some real time logs as I walked around the hospital. They're "working with the vendors" to determine what the issue is (APs associating but not authenticating), because apparently they will be upgrading to BES10 afterall. If they give me any follow-up I'll post it.

Still doesn't change the fact that the profiles will disable themselves on failure. Most unhelpful.

Posted via CB10

[kill_9]

WiFi profile automatically disabling after 3 connection attempts is an optimization algorithm to prevent trying a previously identified 'bad' access point.

Posted via CB10 on the BlackBerry Z10

[Andrew4life]

Had this problem on my Playbook and having this issue on my Z10 as well.
Really really annoying!

[amaccuish]

I also have been experiencing this problem. I believe in an enterprise environment, where WiFi authentication is performed against an ldap server such as Active Directory, the 3 attempts limit is useful to prevent locking out a users AD account, and thus prevent them logging on, as most networks I have seen have their password policy to lockout at above 3. If a user were required to change their password, and then did not update on their phone, their account would soon be locked as the phone would keep trying to authenticate with the old password. A better way to handle this on the phone would be to warn the user the profile had been disabled, and only apply this to access points that use a radius server to authenticate clients. If the access point uses a plain PSK, then the phone should keep trying as its unlikely there is a danger of locking out someone's account.

[Revampd]

Well, it's been said that the Playbook OS was a test bed for the Z10's OS. Looks like they brought forward the bugs too. My Playbook does this often, my Bold does not. I will not be upgrading to a BB10 phone any time soon. At this point I think I'll just keep what I have as I have no complaints with my 9300. The ball is in Blackberry's court. Hopefully these things will be ironed out in a more timely fashion than they have on the Playbook.

[mike4444]

I just posted about a similar difficulty my email account just seem to randomly disconnect....Is that your problem too...I think it's is?

[the real serenia]

There are actually two issues here. The first one that initially caused the most annoyance for me was the fact that wifi profiles will automatically disable after several unsuccessful authentication attempts. Apparently by design, it sucks. However, I've noticed now that after some time, say half an hour, a profile that automatically disabled itself will reconnect by itself without requiring me to manually re-enable it. Still completely unacceptable, waiting 30 mins to reconnect instead of having the device hammer away repeatedly until a connection is made is not optimal.

However, in the process of working this out, it appears that the reason for the authentication errors (failing in step 2 of EAP) are the Aruba AP's themselves here at the hospital. We've determined that at the adjacent building (cisco network based) there is no issue with prompty latching on and handing over between APs. Blackberry and the vendors have been working at the problem (it helps that our CEO is a BB fan) and hopefully some good news will come out of this.

[ArsenalGunner]

Same issue here: My Z10 often disables my work Wi-Fi profile. But it doesn't stop there, I've noticed that when the profile gets disabled it's also re-ordered to 2nd position in my 3 saved profiles. Interestingly, at the same time, the AT&T Wi-Fi profile is raised to the top even if I've disabled and condemned it to the bottom.

It was so much nicer when my 9900 obeyed my simple Wi-Fi wishes! But I'll be patient with my Z10.

I work for a large state university and we use HP APs with WPA2-Enterprise. All APs use the same SSID. On the Z10, IPv6 and Inter-AP Handover are off because I haven't seen any difference when they're on.

[Francois Marcoux]

I would leave inter AP on, that helped me on my University network, IPv6 can remain disabled as it isn't implemented yet.

Posted via CB10

[malakia2966]

Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh... It is a little comforting to know others are suffering the same frustration. My 9800 was ROCK SOLID. I know many other people had issues with that phone, but 3yrs and a TON of usage and no issues. So I upgrade, rather willingly, but this ONE issue (other minor ones) is driving me mad. Oddly, those experiencing it on their Playbook, is an issue I have NOT seen it on my Playbook, but EVERY frikin' day on my Z10.

Rant and Vent over.

Any solutions?!?

M.