The installation went smoothly and everything seemed to be working correctly. My laptop and smartphone were connecting flawlessly. I set-up and tested the customer’s laptops, iPads and games console and they also worked without any problem.

However, I received a call a few weeks later from the customer saying that his iPhone and his wife’s iPhone were not connecting. These were not available at the timer of the network set up so I could not configure and test the iPhones.

I assumed that the WiFi security password was being entered incorrectly since everything else was working fine.

However, when I visited customer’s premises to check things out I discovered that there was nothing wrong with the password or any of the other settings in the iPhones. I also confirmed that the iPhone’s were connecting to other wireless network’s without any problem buy configuring my smartphone as a WiFi hotspot.

So, I had a wireless network that was working fine with all devices except the iPhones and I had iPhones that were working fine with other wireless networks.

After much head-scratching, I eventually discovered that the problem was that the customer’s router was not sending out an IP address to the iPhones. It was sending out IP addresess to every other device (including iPads), but it was not sending out IP addresses to the customer’s iPhones.

I had come across this sort of problem before where there is some odd incompatibility between a router and a local network device which causes IP addresses not to be allocated to the device.

I knew that it would be a fruitless task to try and get the router and the iPhones communicating as they should. I also knew that a different router would probably solve the problem, but that would require another visit and more expense.

Instead, I decided to set up each iPhone with a manual IP address for each of the customer’s wireless access points. These could in fact be the same IP address for each wireless access point.

This is easy to do as long as you know the following:

• IP address outside range allocated by router (eg 192.168.1.200)
• IP address subnet mask: (eg 255.255.255.000)
• Router gateway IP address: (eg 192.168.1.1)
• DNS IP address: (eg 192.168.1.1 – in this case router could process DNS requests)

[NB the IP addresses noted above are examples. Each network will be different.]

Once I had entered the IP address information in each iPhone they connected to the customer’s wireless network without any problem.

I have come across this type of problem several times. For some inexplicable reason devices that should talk to each other don’t do so. Sometimes there is a relatively easy solution or work-around, on other occasions there is not.

A few year ago a customer had a fax machine that would not send to a particular fax machine, but both machines could connect to other fax machines without a problem.

I could not solve that one, but fortunately there was a relatively easy solution to the iPhone problem.

Contact Premitel if you have any telecommunications or networking problems that require expert troubleshooting.